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tv   U.S. Senate  CSPAN  November 20, 2012 12:00pm-5:00pm EST

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sure the people knew that the graduates of our universities were skilled communicators. >> talking about the internationalization [inaudible] in place in the relationships among the faculty members and students i was treated not very respectfully by my professor basically because of my origin and nationality it is between a
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student and professor and not about students it is going to be a whole different story. thank you. >> i think it starts at the top with regard to leadership and the modeling of what we call it here at the university of vermont a document called a our common ground, which is fundamentally based on respect and civility in our discourse even though the university is one that should have robust conversations about all of the great issues of the nature and meaning of life that we were talking about earlier. ..
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>> i which is going to say one of the interesting changes in american education right now has to do with international undergraduates. america's great research universities have long had large population of international graduate students. likewise, most american colleges and universities have a lot of discussion not only successful but about intergroup relations among undergraduates. but a lot of that has been about
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american undergraduates of the different groups. for a variety of reasons some of them, education from some of them financial. we have seen huge shift in recent years where american universities are recruiting many more international undergraduates. and i don't think they have always talked about the issues related to the. two recent stories that struck me of concern we did, there's a very interesting study asking graduates instead significant friendships among american students. and very large numbers said they did not. we often did a story on websites that have sprouted up at ohio state and university of nebraska and they're called ohio state haters, nebraska haters. these are websites where the people are anti-hate. they go to the twitter feeds of undergraduates and find racist
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statements and then basically call out to students who made them by publishing with the students names did you know so-and-so said this. this is for all kinds of hate, but a remarkable number of the comments on both universities websites are actually about asian students, suggesting a real lack of tolerance for, let alone, inclusiveness for populations. and i think that there is a missing part of universities promoting tolerance and diversity is a discussion about international undergrads, which is change the dynamic of many american universities. >> i very much, peter, i very
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much agree with the idea of humanity been a core part of the university. and i resonate with the argument that, particularly large corporations, are more interested in the extremely bright humanities major than a finance major. but i think that that's a limited group. when i was at bank of america 20 years ago, involved in hiring some folks, we really wanted the extremely bright economist would be really great, or even a philosophy major, but they really had to be extremely bright, and preferably from a very high ranking school. but, and we make that argument often, but that's a fairly limited pool of percentage of
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our humanity graduates. if you don't have a c+ average excuse me, a b+ average, you're just not in the criminal. then go for the finance major. and, in fact, you really don't want that philosophy major, for that first job. you are training them for the second, third, whatever job. so i think to some extent the argument, that argument for the humanities doesn't come it isn't, doesn't hold weight for the broad group of people. though we often make it. i think what parents and students come it's not just parents that want jobs. it's the students, and the way to get that first job is to know something concrete that the employer can use.
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now, i grant this isn't just a skills training program, but you've got to know how to write, to speak, to think. and i think a lot of our problem is that we graduate many students that don't necessarily do that well. and if the humanity majors, and they do not do that especially well, then they have got trouble. so, and they can't necessarily prove they do those things will. earlier someone said, i think you, jim, talked about the need for computer skills. my guess is that if the humanities majors, major really helped some sort of certification, that showed certain skills. i think that we haven't fully grappled with how to deal with
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our desire, our feeling that we need to have the humanities as a critical part of the university, we need to have the numbers, students take these. we believe that but we haven't grappled with how we can get these folks jobs. they are not going to get at the big corporations and less they have very good grades. and we can't necessarily, so far, it's not easy for them to establish they have the skills, especially if they don't have those good grades. so i wonder what you think of all that. >> let me comment. when i think of a liberal education i don't necessarily think of the major inhumanities. someone can major in biophysics or even to date engineering. and still have a very liberal his education background.
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i attended that school for lost boys in new haven, and had a degree in electrical engineer but i took more courses in history, philosophy, psychology. the most viable course i ever took was in child psychology because it taught me how to understand students but it sure taught how to understand faculty, stimulus response, reinforcement and so forth. [laughter] so the first thing is the liberal education i think should be a goal for all students regardless of what the major. if they pick up ph deprogramming along the way and major in elizabethan english, fine. but the second thing i would say is that we have entered an era in which education now truly becomes lifelong. and i think it's incumbent upon us to think much more strategically about it so is going to be spending a significant fraction of their
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time, estimates at least 20% of their time or more, throughout their lives learning and relearning and we adapting, what's the best way to use those early years? how do you prepare them for that? i don't think we thought that too. i think, we're just today, students have a shopping mall approach to education. they offer in the mall whatever faculty want to teach and they haven't thought about strategically. the issues you put out a really important, but i think you need to look at them but within this broader context of how do we really prepare and use those years to prepare someone for a lifelong experience and need to learn. not an easy challenge. >> i would also add that as you well know the advent of a higher education is turning towards many more opportunities for internships and co-op programs, which is a way for these
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students to get that additional props out of the classroom experience, during the summer or perhaps on a leave for the semester. so i think we're going to see a lot more of that bridging from the pure academic discussion in the classroom to the practical skills development and working collaboratively, which is so important, through intern opportunities and co-op. and these don't have to be just science or engineering. they can be placing those liberal arts students into pathways and into making connections into the network that will help with that job. >> you know that will take special effort because that's where the most problems in getting those interned. they work fine in hospitality or accounting or a lot of areas that are close to the job market. the hardest, internship for history major is a real
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challenge. but i agree with you. and i think that what you and jim have both said makes sense. i like the idea that you're both sort of getting into it more deeply because i do believe there's a substantial group of undergraduate humanities majors. i think liberal arts education serving needs to include science by the way, of course, but humanities majors who, who, that are extraordinarily good students. they are reasonable but not extraordinary good students, that do, that had a real job challenge. and we've got to figure out how to deliver on that are help them deliver. because they go to school, part because they hope to be employ employed. >> i just wanted to comment on the perception that some
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corporations may have that hiring humanities, educated student is a sound investment, which it may very well be. a lot of corporation, especially the elite corporation, 10 to higher from select schools. so they are hiring students from schools that have undergone a selection process for talent right from the start. now, if you look at the select schools, liberal arts colleges in new england or across the country, the science and engineering make up a small percentage of the student body. so if they are soliciting their employees from the schools, they will tend to hire more humanities students but it's not necessarily that the humanities provides, alone, provide better training for education. i spent a great deal of time at smith college wizard engine program there, and i found that
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all the students they were brilliant, of course. and that the corset inhumanities were as rigorous as the courses in the sciences and in engineering. but what we were striving for their, and i think that many schools are striving for now our holistic come holistic we educated people that understand humanities and sciences. and i think in this century that you're going to be shortchanging yourself if you hire individuals that are only trained inhumanities, that can write well, but have not been trained in quantity thinking because they may get that first job that they would limit themselves. one of the things, i just wanted to say this, because i've been dying to say this. is that for engineers, one of the main reason to engineers go, engine and students go into engineering it because there is this pressure to get the job, right? but we have misguided engine and
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students for many years because we tell them, come to engineering so you can get that first job. what we should be telling this to come and inching so you can go out there and create jobs. this is something that we have not done well in engineering, is to teach the creativity, the integration with humanities and the needs of society so the engineers when they leave are not just thinking about where my going to get that first job, but where am i going to get that first job, make a huge difference and create more jobs. i think that comes from a moralistic approach to education. >> even picking up on engineering, for example, the perspective that is provided from there is disciplines in terms of -- [inaudible] it's hard, like bio design and where engineers to draw from like the sciences and, hard to draw from understanding and ethnology and other cultures.
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it's impossible to really isolate the disciplines anymore. i mean, that's something that we are moving away fromcome and we're moving towards more holistic than understanding. >> i wanted to speak to the point in that you said about students graduate who can't write well, and can't, aren't demonstrated critical thinking skills. the book focused on the results that are visible at institutions that require students, regardless of majors, to read a lot and write a lot. and think about our discussion here today about public versus private. and scholarship and teaching, and i think one of the big changes recently is that private institutions have been much more successful at protecting things
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like class spies, and it just goes logically that if you are teaching, if you're teaching 15 freshmen to write coming you can assign a lot more writing and meaningfully read a lot more papers than if you're teaching 35 freshmen to read, or if you're teaching 100 freshmen to read. and i was at an event recently sitting with a smith college professor and a berkeley professor, and they had the same class load, but a smith college professor has about 10% of the students. as the berkeley professor. and the discussion was about what that enabled one to do. and i think that's an interesting question about the sacrifices the public may because they have lost positions, and how that carries over into things like how much do you write. i am afraid we're out of time, i hope you please join me in thanking our excellent panel dealing with these challenges. [applause]
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>> [inaudible conversations] >> shortly we'll go live to the council on foreign relations for marks from federal communications commission chair julius genachowski. is expected to discuss international telecommunications policy. that will be live at 12:30 p.m. eastern on c-span2. be sure to join us tonight from the washington ideas form or a roundtable discussion. a look at america's strategic competitiveness. wrong. >> how does one adequately express his feelings about a special friend? when that friend is also a world
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icon, a national hero of hero unimaginable proportions. unimaginable proportion and a legend whose name will live in . neil, wherever you neil armstro armstrong. fate looked down kindly on us when she chose neil to be the first to venture to another world and to have the opportunity to look back from space at the beauty of our own. it could have been another, but it wasn't, and it wasn't for a reason. no one, no one, but no one could have accepted the responsibility of his remarkable accomplishment with more dignity and more grace
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than neil armstrong. he embodied all that is good and >> just before 11:30 a behind the scenes look at life as a teenager in the white house with susan ford bales and lyndon johnson robb. just after one, how scientists are using gain skills and gaming theories to solve world problems. >> a quick reminder that at 12:30 we'll hear from julius genachowski discussing policy. that's about 10 minutes away. right now "wall street journal" reporter andrew grossman talks about the latest in hurricanes and relief efforts from today's "washington journal." >> andrew grossman is a reporter with "the wall street journal." good morning. thank you for being here. you cover the new delegation,
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new york politics and you were just in the region on vice president biden's trip up there tell us about the damage that you saw along the coast of new jersey and new york. what's the situation like a couple weeks later? >> we spent a lot of time on the jersey shore and there i haven't seen that yet. it was really bad. there's entire towns, a lot of these are beach communities, on a barrier island. they are still streets that are covered with sand. it looks like snow essentially. the our houses that have been picked up and turned 45 degrees, 45 degrees. people just starting to trickle back into these neighborhoods. so in a lot of places it looks like a goes down. there's still goldings boarded up. some of them have opened, spray-painted on the but they look pretty much close. not a lot of people around. usually if you're in a motorcade you see people on sides of the street waiting. there it was pretty desolate. >> what was your experience in
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china with vice president? how much interaction do they get with residents and what sorts of concerns, complaints and issues with a bringing to his ear as was the other folks who were there? >> there weren't a lot of residents around. he was mostly talking to local officials, greeting first responders. he talked to mayors about the beaches, talking about erosion. he got a briefing on dealing with beach replenishment, a big issue. these barrier beaches protect the houses behind them. there's issues like it is, for example, msha the army corps come in and build the entire, they said that in places where there were not itunes, the houses behind them were protected. places where the beaches were not as built up the damage was much worse. so there's a lot of talk about how you rebuild these places in ways that protect them from future storms. >> tell us about the most
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monetary role. it's been a resource to be able to pay for all of the money is being asked for, all the claims are coming in? how does that process worked? >> right now seems like fema has enough money to get to the initial bit of claims. those are the sort of aid to individuals, some reimbursement for state and local efforts, emergency transformation, that sort of thing. so there's also individuals can apply for and are applying for aid to pay for damaged property but that's only up to $31,900 i believe. so beyond that there's going to be probably a legislative fight the next couple of weeks, including the lame duck or possibly next year over more money to pay for bigger repairs that fema doesn't cover right away. >> we have a phone lines up for people who have been impacted by the hurricane. here's that number to call at the top with andrew grossman of "the wall street journal."
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it's on the screen. republicans, (202) 585-3881, independent dollars (202) 585-3882. democrats. >> translator: . again if you're impacted by hurricane. and you can when president, vice president biden you shot some figure, footage. will take a look at that and if you can tell us about what you saw and give us more of a sense of what images really captured your eyes. >> so what you're seeing here, this is the jersey coast from about seaside park come seaside heights. we're going to go by, this is a pure of the famous seaside heights. the roller coaster that fell right into the ocean. if you look down the streets, their stand to talk about that
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is blown straight down into the streets blocks down. some of those houses as well. you can see are thrown at it, is skewed. so it's striking, especially from the air because it stretches for such a long period. you can also see from the air how some places, the damage is was bad and other places it looks basically untouched. so they're simply some difference. it might not be something as when you go to the beach for a day, but in the way that the beaches are shaped and built that affects how bad they were hit. >> here's a story written by our guest andrew grossman. is as property owners are discovering that neither funds distributed by fema nor their homeowners insurance policy are enough to pay for the tens of thousands of dollars in damage caused by storm driven floods. what's it like to request aid, and how much money are we talking about in terms of individual payout?
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doesn't make up what people need? speak it doesn't make about people need if you don't have flood insurance. so individual aid, there's a maximum of 31,900, which if you watch on isn't enough to rebuild it. homeowners insurance policies don't cover flood damage. it's covered through this national flood insurance program, which is federally subsidized, because the private insurance industry doesn't want to go anywhere near this stuff. and so, people who live in floodplains, according to maps drawn by the government, are required to buy flood insurance. by people who don't generally don't have flood insurance. the problem is, sandy flouted lots of areas that were not on those floodplains maps. i talked to a guy industry has been living in the same neighborhood for 40 years, never had a drop of water in his house, and never bought flood insurance. so he is going to be in rough shape trying to rebuild his
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basement. places like hoboken across the hudson river in new jersey, flood insurance, people have flood insurance but it doesn't cover finished basement but if you're living in an urban area where people have basement apartments that they rent out, rely on income, they have finished basement, talking not necessarily basement that all the way down the garden apartments, that sort of thing, that's only covered up to $5000. people are potentially out a lot of money even if they have maximum coverage. >> here's the gentlemen you just referred to in brooklyn. repairs and appliances will likely cost him between 20 and $30,000. fema will tell him it will be $4400 as part of an individual assistance program. let's take a look at the payout for hurricanes and as a the 16th of this month. we are looking at a 616 million-420,000 residents impacted. that six under $60 million going to those residents.
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the average grant about $1400, and a maximum payout as andrew grossman mentioned is about $31,900. let's go to the phones and hear from marshall, democrats line. good morning you are on the air. go ahead and turn on your tv. >> caller: good morning. you know, number one, fema wrote in here may be five or six days ago. we were completely in the dark. everybody left. [inaudible] you know what i'm saying? now team of makes -- i'm trying to relocate. they're talking about this is a loan. this can't be a loan right now. i take you much taxes. you know? so i don't know. the guys sitting down, talking
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to, trying to spread help for fema, he's not helping me. >> host: stay on the phone to give any questions? >> guest: there are fema loans they're handing out. they are loans that they'll offer low-interest loans for damage. did you have any sort of flood insurance or was so damaged you have? >> caller: i was renting out of someone's apartment right now so i'm pretty much, you know, on my own. >> guest: i think fema generally and i'm not one of% sure i think the german offer loans for damage to things inside your house. i.t. that, i'm not certain on this, that the grants that take cash payouts are generally for people, for property owners pick up one thing i believe you should be able to look into is rental assistance. if you're in a place you in, what's the shape of the place
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you are in like? >> caller: it's dark. >> guest: you might be available for some rental assistance to play for a temporary place to stay while you're out of a home. >> host: thanks for your call, marshall. treachery c-span, i will always continue to watch. >> host: good luck to you. bill by jim says i know someone who lost a recording studio and he told that he was told insurance may not cover. >> host: in that case it's small business administration offers low interest loans. but it is a business for recording studio you might not have, want to take on more debt so restaurants, for thinking these people are in kind of rough shape. is talk some of that might be in a fundamental package from congress, tax incentives, moray, that sort of thing. lawmakers are pushing for the. >> host: what is asking for
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specific? >> guest: they haven't come up with a list yet. the only number we've seen so far is andrew cuomo has asked, he said is going to for 30 billion. he's done that without talking to the congressional delegation, without talking to chris christie. he wants things like a too small businesses, money for infrastructure. a lot of these local governmen governments, cities, states would like to spend the money can get money from the federal government to invest in things to make sure it isn't as bad the next time it happens. >> host: let's hear from mississippi. our independent line. good morning. >> caller: good morning. i live in mississippi but i'm retired federal firefighter from california. and disasters, whether it's hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, wildfires, whatever, most jurisdictions find that they're overwhelmed by the time it happens because disasters overwhelm every jurisdiction. so whether you're in new york or
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down in the coast of mississippi, the jurisdictions that are in charge of trying to mitigate these problems are so overwhelmed, and most are victims themselves. we need a national -- we need a national fire disaster program that exists within the federal government. the resources are there without going to a lot of expense. all disasters is similar to what would happen in a motel. a hotel, if everybody goes into a hotel, they see on the door what to do when a fire starts, how to get out, the hallways are designed to carry the capacity of the people, and so forth. and then once they're out they need to be accounted for. and he'd have an emergency service that can come in and mitigate the problem. most jurisdictions do not have the resources to do this. when it comes to police and fire, i mean when it comes to
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things that have to do with police, we have the fbi that is the national organization that has the resources to do the things that local jurisdictions, whether state or local don't have the resources to do. i believe that it's possible to have speed you can see this "washington journal" segment at our website, c-span.org. live now to the senate floor on foreign relations for remarks from the recommendations commission chair julius genachowski. is expected to discuss international telecommunications policy. this is just getting underway. >> very excited to be here today. is perhaps the most anticipated cfr event and much as the new james bond movie. i'm glad that chairman could join us today. just a quick introduction, prior to his fcc opponent, chairman genachowski was chief of business operations before that general counsel at iac
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interactive corp., special advisor and cofounder of the technology incubator lunchbox digital. his full bio is in your packages. i will turn over to the chairman for some quick opening remarks. we'll been going to the conversation where i follow up with some questions, and then after that we will open up to audience conversation. thanks so much. chairman, the floor is yours. >> thank you. well, happy, happy thanks giving. happy thanksgiving, everyone. i, for one, and thankful that the election is over so that we can finally focus on the real issues facing america, like catching -- homeland is a tv show. on the showtime. [laughter] let's move to nonfiction. it is a provincial me to be at
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the council on foreign relations. and thank you to the council for hosting, and and for muttering. i see a number of people in the audience who have done such an important work in the space, so my colleagues from other government agencies. i.c. charlie firestone from the aspen institute. very involved in issues i will be talking about today. let me start with one provocative sentence from jeffrey sachs of columbia university. he said recently the information and communications technology revolution is short of the most single force or economic development in the world today. i want to talk about that today, about the enormous opportunities that broadband revolution is creating. i will also talk about the dangers fact that the global internet is at a crossroads. threats to the future of the internet have never been more
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serious, and if we don't tackle these threats, the u.s. and other nations will pay the price in the form of lost economic growth and development, stifled innovation and social progress and diminished opportunity. so i will describe those threats and talk about what needs to happen for us to keep the global internet on the right path. to harness the opportunities new communications, technologies to benefit all. there's a lot that about the relationship between communications technologies and world events, but in some important ways the relationship between the mutations, technology and world history has always been a profound one. the printing press was a new communications technology that changed the world. it won't take us back that far, but for a few minutes i will take us back 50 years to a powerfully important speech given by an fcc chairman in
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1961. that made president john f. kennedy's. , newton minnow, spoke to the national association of broadcasting. his speech generally remembered for the declaration that tv had become a vast wasteland. but the speech, and i recommend reading it was actually about much more than its remembered for. at its core insights provide enduring lesson, very relevant for today. minow spoke about the new communications technologies of his day. broadcast tv, what we now call cable tv and satellite communications. they were all discussed in his speech. in his overriding message, was that these technologies offer new opportunities to do good, and to do the opposite.
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and he spoke about how our obligation as a society was to seize the positive opportunities new communications technology, to harness the power of technology for the benefit of all people, to advance the causes of prosperity and freedom, to educate and inform, to help our children fulfill their potential, to help our great nation to a bright future. and to do these things at home and around the world. now, newton minow spoke in a speech in 1961, this is a book, the technological knowledge that makes it possible as the president has said, not only to destroy our world but to destroy poverty around the world. is speech explicitly and imagines a future where new communications technologies will tie together, and these are quotes, tied together indiana and india, chicago and the
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congo. that speech, newton minow's insights, were inspirational to me when i first read them 20 years ago. and the fact is they helped inform today how the fcc thinks about new communications technologies. because the core messages from the speech are as motivated as they were 50 years ago. i mean, any difference of course is -- [inaudible] satellites. it's broadband internet. so let's start with the opportunities around broadband internet. the benefits already been delivered by wired and wireless broadband are nothing short of extraordinary. we see it here at home in the u.s. is no exaggeration to say the high speed reshaping the u.s. economy. we can hardly imagine a world without google, facebook, twitter, amazon, wikipedia,
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without e-mail, texting, or the apple stores people are using to download 100 million apps at a. broadband has also transforming education, enabling learning and interactive digital textbooks. it's revolutionizing health care with remote monitoring, remote diagnostics, digital health records, education, health care, energy, public safety, government performance, elections, broadband wired and wireless is transform everything. it's already a game changer, and we're still in the early innings of this new communications technology. now, these opportunities, where we are in the curve of the technology and the opportunities, this is known around the world. when i meet with my international counterparts in every region of the world they are focus on the opportunities of broadband. each of our global competitors
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wants to become a 21st century hub for broadband related innovation. and in today's flats global economy, where capital conflict anywhere and innovators can work anywhere, we have to acknowledge the u.s. leadership going forward is not a given. it's something that we have to earn a new every day. and u.s. broadband leadership is particularly vital as unfit as developing countries grow and middle-class expand around the world. these are big development but we should embrace them as a spur to our global competitiveness to ensure that we have in the u.s. world leading broadband infrastructure. to assure that acquitted capital and talent continue to flow here, and to ensure that we are the world leading innovation economy for the 21st century. now, there's good news on this front. over the past four years, the
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u.s. has regained global leadership in key areas of the broadband economy. take mobile where we have moved from lacquered leader. four years ago people were talking about mobile innovation. of talk about mobile innovation in asia. and it was on the mobile infrastructure. they were talking about it in europe, describing the u.s. as a backwater. today, the u.s. is a clear world later on mobile innovation. u.s. companies invented the apps economy, and in four years the percentage of mobile devices globally, with us-made operating systems, has grown from 20% to 80% in four years. around the world american apps are leading the way. and a mobile infrastructure the u.s. is now leading the world and deploying to scale the next generation of 4g, 4g lte.
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this new platform will allow us to enjoy broadband, on the go comparable to what we're used to from our wi-fi connections at home. the u.s. has today more 4g subscribers than the rest of the world combined. and we are on a path to maintain that leadership into the future. this is incredibly important because 4g lte is the leading platform for next-generation mobile, and mobile will be a leading, if not the leading platform, for innovation for years to come. there's a similar story of improve innovation infrastructure unwired broadband, not to go into at this point, but it is important to note that the progress in wired and wireless broadband in the u.s. together are having a positive effect o on the u.s. economy. private investment and job
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creation in the sector are strong and growing. now, for all of the benefits of broadband is creating here at home, its power to spur economic growth and opportunity may be even greater in emerging economies. the world bank estimates that a 10% increase in broadband penetration, corresponds to a one point for point increase in gdp in developing countries, higher than the corresponding rate for developed countries. it's not hard to understand why but the point to notice is the magnitude of the benefit to developing countries gdp from driving broadband deployment. and the fact is that the global broadband story is just beginning globally. because today we have about 1 billion mobile broadband subscribers worldwide. the book of that is in developed countries. here's what experts estimate will happen over the next few years, by 2016.
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a number of mobile broadband subscribers globally is expected to grow him 1 billion to 5 billion. 5 million mobile broadband subscribers by 2016. 2017 the point is the same. whether it's creating new opportunities for small businesses worldwide, a bank getting wet and market information, to farmers spreading access to prenatal care, and information to expecting mothers and young mothers, with its empowering people with information, the opportunities are amazing and hard to understate in a world that will have 5 billion internet connected people. this is one of the reasons why at the usaid under the leadership of raj shah, they are now using broadband technology to promote the government
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worldwide and are focused on this broadband opportunity. now, by focusing on the amazing opportunities of broadband, economic, noneconomic, i don't mean to suggest there are no risks for downsizing that come with broadband to of course there are. very serious was. cyber threats, texting and driving, theft of intellectual property. throughout history every technological breakthrough has created new changes along with new opportunity. this was one of newton minow's points in the speech, part of a lead into the vast wasteland. the challenge, he said, and we recognize today is that how do we realize the incredible potential of today's new communication technology. broadband internet, maximize its benefits for global prosperity and opportunity, while addressing the dangers. the first step i would are just focusing on how to unlock the benefits of broadband.
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what priorities, and then address the dangers with manyfold tailored and smart strategies, ones that don't undermine the recipe for economic growth and brought opportunity. ic-3 key pillars of a vibrant broadband ecosystem. infrastructure, innovation and inclusion. start with infrastructure. if you build it, apps and services will come but you got to go and that has its own set of challenges in every country. what makes the challenge even great is that when it comes to wired and wireless broadband networks you've got to keep building it. to compete in the global digital economy, countries, ours and others, will need to deploy ever faster and higher capacity networks. and that's not the only challenge. in this space we need to address the infrastructure we can see, like fiber and towers, and also
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our invisible infrastructure, the airwaves, spectrum, that mobile devices and mobile internet needs to operate. this is under tremendous stress from very rapidly growing demand for spectrum. and this requires new policy breakthroughs. it's why of the fcc we've been focusing on developing a new ideas like instant of options, spectrum sharing, next-generation and licensed spectrum use. these are all solutions of very significant infrastructure challenges. they are not the only ones. second pillar, innovation. the interconnection between infrastructure, wired infrastructure, towers, and innovation, didn't finish the infrastructure and innovation is one of the key insights of the u.s. national broadband plan which the fcc wrote and released
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in early 2010. at that point other countries have developed broadband plans, but those plans focused just on the infrastructure be. in fact, they focus religious on the wired infrastructure peace. when we prepared a plan we said that smart policies requires promoting a healthy broadband ecosystem. networks as well as applications. we said policies should promote a virtuous cycle where broadband networks spur innovative application, where those applications drive growing user demand for bandwidth, which generates return an instance for network operators to invest in improving and expanding broad work -- broadband networks, and am ago, a virtuous cycle. the resolution of the net neutrality two and half years ago was driven by a desire to
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promote this virtuous cycle. and, indeed, in the u.s., i'd investment and innovation throughout the broadband ecosystem is both network and in applications, is up significantly in this period and growing. along with infrastructure and innovation there's one more essential pillar, inclusion. inclusion in our broadband economy, access code is important for two reasons. one is equity. having large swaths of people who can't connect to the internet in the 21st century is today's equivalent of people without access to electricity in the 20th century. the other recent inclusion matters is what economists call network effect. the more people on broadband network, the more valuable the networks become to everyone on it. and to the economy in which they operate. so now how best to build these
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pillars of infrastructure, innovation and inclusion? at the fcc we focused our policies on four key priorities. first, private investment. and less government is going to operate communication networks themselves, not a wise approach projected by history, we need massive private investment investment unleash the opportunities of broadband, and a thriving private market for broadband and other advanced communication services. we need massive private investment in infrastructure networks, and massive private investment in applications and services. and so when you to foster a strong and healthy climate for private investment, which involves recognizing legitimacy and the need or returns on investment. because without those returns there's no incentive or private capital to invest in networks or
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services and the upgrades we need for faster speeds and more capacity. second, competition. competition is the lifeblood of our free market economy, and a uniquely powerful tool to drive private investment, innovation, and to increase consumer value. the more competition, more investment, the better off consume ours -- consumers are. it is required to promote and preserve competition, particularly in the i.t. sector in the u.s. for example, the mobile marketplace two years ago was on the doorstep of duopoly. but our rejection, along with the justice department other proposed at&t mobile deal with other procompetition actions we have taken have led to improving competition picture in the united states. the third priority, preserving
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internet freedom and openness. the ability to speak, innovate engaged online without having to ask anyone's permission has driven the internet unparalleled success. at the u.n. lasher president obama spoke strongly about this thing that the u.s. will support a free and open internet so individuals have information to make up their own money. no one has been more forceful advocate of the economic and social opportunities of the open internet and secretary of state hillary clinton. who delivered a landmark speech of internet freedom in 2010 when she said one of the fundamental freedoms of the internet age was the freedom to connect. the idea that governments should not prevent people from connecting to the internet to websites, or to each other. now, internet freedom is sometimes cited as an obstacle to addressing the issues of cybersecurity and intellectual property theft. i disagree with the.
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i disagree not because i question the importance of the issues of the magnitude of the threat your very serious problems that we have to address. but i believe based on my experience that we can address those issues without undermining the core values like internet freedom and privacy. we've put our money where our mouths are at the fcc and we've taken important steps along these lines. for example, driving a multi-stakeholder process over the last year and a half that developed a botnet code of conduct for isps. and other concrete steps to improve network security, steps consistent with internet freedom and supported by the internet community as was by network operator. let me turn to the fourth party, universal access. history and economics teaches that the private market on its own won't deliver universal access to communication services.
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as population density, and as typography becomes more challenging and more expensive to build a, the deployment and operations just don't add up. is a reality. and even were networks exist, it's also reality that to me people don't subscribe, there are number of different reasons, but cost is one. the digital divide is a real issue, particularly as the cost of digital exclusion continue to rise. what do i mean by the cost of digital exclusion rising? just imagine if you were looking for a job, fighters go after looking for job get a kind of newspaper, look at the classifieds, he would have called or you would have asked an application. so now let's -- almost 80% of fortune 500 companies do 100% of the job postings online and require online application. so if you have access to
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internet, you are out of the. i can take the same story about education is going and the teachers i talked to around the country you are incredibly frustrated that even as we tried to teach their kids what they need to know to thrive in a digital economy, about half their kids don't have broadband at home and can't do the assignments. we got a letter from a high school student in florida who said here's what she does to complete your assignment that would require internet access. she drives to her local library at night after it is closed, and sits in the parking lot where she can get wi-fi hookup. but that's not a good answer the digital divide is a good issue and smart government action can help drive universal access. this is what drove the fcc last year to adopt a once in a generation comprehensive overhaul of the $4.5 billion a
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year universal service fund. we transformed it from a telephone focused program and one at that, too inefficient program focus on universal broadband. so these pillars and priorities not only guide our policy work in the united states. they guide our international engagement in the i.t. sector. and they have in the past, historically. in ways that it had a profound affect. to explain how, let me take a detour into the arab spring. in egypt last year, when they can shut down the internet, shutdown global service, many asked how are they able to do that. what does it mean they can do that? is a very important question. but let me focus on another important question that fewer people asked. how did egypt come to have an
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internet and the mobile service worth shutting down? the short answer lies in the most important policy a congressman of the clinton administration that most people, present company excluded, have never heard of. world trade organization agreement on basic telecommunications. back in the 1990s, monopolies operated communications networks in most countries around the world, generally government owned or controlled monopoly. that was the world most of us grew up in. it was before the internet and mobile communications took off, and it's not a coincidence that the end of that world coincided with a takeoff of mobile and internet. in any event, back then in the '90s, leaders at the white house, as stated above, commerce department, and yes the fcc, develop what many thought at the time was a crazy and certainly
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hopeless idea. what is, they ask and what if we push to privatize communicate should, companies in markets around the world, what if we moved the world toward open market access, robust competition? and it wasn't easy. it took years. i watch as my then boss, fcc chairman we can't, worked tirelessly with vice president gore and u.s. trade rep, and the result, 69 nations represent over 90% of the world telecommunications revenue side a wto agreement in early 1997, committing to open private markets and competition and rule of law. the agreement and the private market competition has launched,
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help spur in the years that followed trillions of dollars in new investment, in infrastructure, telecommunications around the world, and help spur a huge historically unprecedented wave of worldwide communications technology innovation, mobile and internet. ..
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over the decades and as the global market continues to grow as we head the new metrics hawk in dove described it's going from one to 5 billion the u.s. economy will continue to build it so given this history and the fortune a seat when i became the chairman in 2009i made it a priority to the engage in international issues and these have led to dialogue with a broad range of countries including mexico and brazil and the telecom agency and issues ranging from broadband to
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disaster relief and public safety and they run the international stafford who works on these issues in my office we have such a fantastic team that is focused on these opportunities and issues. our work internationally stems from our early recognition of the opportunities of broadband, opportunities that could benefit all countries and all people and also the looming threats to a vibrant broadband. what we have learned internationally is we have rolled up our sleeves and has led me to the view that we are now at a crossroads when it comes to the future of the internet. down one path is the free and open internet that drives new innovations the would grow and create opportunity and raise the standard of living for millions
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around the world. it down the other path is the opportunity for countless people around the world, access to life changing innovation and health care and education, less freedom are around the world. let me describe three major threats that could put us on the wrong path to the future of the bill global communication. the first big concern is the proposal to create a new layer of international internet regulations unprecedented proposals to have international bodies impose heavy handed rules that would radically change the proven model of internet government. next month the world conference of international telecommunications would convene to review what are called the international telecommunications regulations. a framework that has never
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applied to the internet. there's a lot at stake. the u.s. government has been preparing for a long time and there is no confusion about our bipartisan and unwavering position to ensure continued investment in internet driven economic growth and opportunity they must reject proposals for new international internet regulations and instead embrace the success of the last two decades and a market driven multi stickler approach that preserves the free flow of data information over the internet. among the proposals that are deeply troubled are proposals the would have an international authority dictate how companies exchange and compensate each other for internet traffic. other proposals would bring cybersecurity under the auspices under these telecommunications regulations and could be used by countries to support monitoring
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the restrictions on our online communication. these proposals not only ignored the success of the past two decades, the change the internet as we know it they would increase uncertainty and raise cost for online innovators everywhere including developing countries for applications for consumers all over the world and putting in developing countries which would in turn suppress the demand for broadband, cyprus investment and networks will accomplish exactly what the opposite of what these proposals purport to do rather than the purchase cycle of networks and applications, these proposals with unblinded to the detriment over the world. its protectionist policies which would slow the growth on the
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global markets towered by an and he did cross border flows of data. some countries for example have already implemented the parliaments and their data centers requirements that undercut the efficiency and cost savings offered by cloud computing and countries are pressing forward and they require the local manufacturing of technology. these policies are bad omen for the u.s. economy and because the company's lead the world in the cloud computing like amazon, microsoft, the policies and directions are bad because they will ultimately be counterproductive for the economy. they are suppressing their devotees of the companies to expand the markets and lower
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their cost. they are suppressing their own innovation economy. the first is the blatant control of online activity that restricts the freedom of information on line and invade privacy, censorship. last month freedom house released its third in a vision of the freedom of the network report. the study found 20 of the 47 nations examined were on a - trajectory when it comes to internet freedom. they are helpful both to the internet of an economic engine and as an engine for broader opportunities. president obama psychiatry clinton and others in the head master should have consistently and forcefully called the other nations to end these practices, and this will continue. each of these threats unfortunately will continue.
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they were a part of the international landscape for some time to come. the upcoming conference won't be the last in which these issues arise in all was in the u.s. government, my colleagues of the state department will need to continue to work on a coordinated strategy. we need to continue to think creatively about all efforts and updating our strategy is to meet this digital moment. we have a powerful story to tell. a story about the ways that the growing trend can increase economic growth and opportunities worldwide and about the link between that growth and principles of openness, freedom, competition and markets one of the amazing things about the story is that they are theoretical after the two decades of mobile and
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internet growth driven by adherence to the principles. so in this context when we think about foreign aid, i see value in including as a part of that sharing expertise and policy solutions with our counterparts in other countries. we have seen historically the success of this approach. we have so many countries to agree to the world trade organization agreement, and fundamentally advise the market structures to make the best that implementing principles in competition, openness, rule of law would increase gdp investments etc in their country they made their best and the proof is very clear. so continuing this effort to engage with other countries in a data driven way that focuses on
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the link between these principles and gdp growth innovation, opportunity, job creation is very important and it's one of the reasons why working with the u.s. telecommunications training institute, a terrific organization we have had a policy officials from 143 countries around the world learn about what we see here in the u.s.. we hosted 49 delegations in the international visitors program and i can tell you from personal experience these officials come and they are incredibly engaged and we shouldn't underestimate the number of highly talented officials are around the world who we got in their countries trying to do the best thing for their economy and to provide opportunities in their countries. i think that this effort to engage directly with other countries for the mutual benefit
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is just the opposite. we have seen that it can make a difference in policies adopted in those entries. last, consistent with this philosophy i participated in a forum where i spoke alongside our military leaders with communications ministers her about a dozen middle eastern countries about the strategies we are pursuing to promote economic growth and opportunity and combat cybersecurity and of the response is very positive by serious substantive engagement and an openness to looking at the data and the fact thinking about what is in the interest of their countries and what is in the mutual interest of all of the countries in the global the economic growth. let me close with a story last month i was in brazil and as i
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try to do all of my international trips in addition to meeting with senior government officials i met with a group of innovators and executives and i spoke with them about basically the same things i've spoken about today the importance of the competition and the free and open internet. when we went to q&a nearly every question or comment was about how the countries could work together to ensure international adherence. it had similar experiences around the world and my point is whether you're in brazil, kansas city, there are young men and women with a desire and a potential to build a bright future, to work on business and social innovations that can unleash new waves of opportunity and economic growth. so this generation the internet is a primary platform for innovation where their future is
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being implemented. my experience has convinced me that we are at a crossroads but nothing i have seen has shaken my optimism. working hard and working together i am convinced that we can turn back the threats and insure people benefit for from the internet and we can harness new communication technologies to help deliver a future of prosperity and peace. thank you. [applause] thank you very much. i want to thank you on behalf of my company you've sustained a constructive dialogue with my chairman and ceo in the administration so think you very much for that. a couple quick questions before we turn it over to the audience. first we talked about the arab
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spring so let's look at the context of that of the challenges that all this innovation potentially faced the united states with and i will throw out a couple. number one is speed. things moved fast and may be traditional u.s. foreign policies are not up to the task. number two, while the opportunity is there i was just in jordan last week and i saw the impact of the deregulation and a vibrant sector that is now 14% of gdp. but against that opportunity they read a story last week about how the syrian government could shut down the government and left it open in the midst of a lot of what has been going on over there and as a result was able to surveil much more effectively the folks that were speaking out against the government and use that retroactively as a tool to sort of understand the networks and make arrests so there's the surveillance aspect which is the flip side in the privacy aspect of potentially 5 billion
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broadband subscribers and the for example is afghanistan. you've gone from half a million cell phones ten years ago to 17 million basically in nine years, and presented it to growth and at the same time the country where the literacy rates are in the 20's, so go a little deeper to read the context of afghanistan and the grasso, syria versus the liberalized country order the biggest challenges to the u.s. foreign policy from all of this innovation in the technology? >> you mentioned i think a number of the biggest challenges one of the ways we benefit from thinking about this is to distinguish between long-term goals were mere term nm management challenges. long-term goals we have to bet on openness, freedom of access to private markets.
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for the reasons i talked about in my remarks and many others, the recipe for global peace and prosperity is in that. a good question though on the short term challenges that are very real and over time it will lead to greater economic opportunity and job creation. in the new term there is potentially a mismatch between connectivity doing dangerous people larger reform without moving the opportunity as quickly. we have many difficult management challenges but one of the things we have to do is speed up the economic opportunity side so if you are as convinced as i am that the
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more there is economic opportunity, the less threats will see. it creates a whole host of challenges. i will give you another example in this general area as the technological changes and what are the options we can half of slowing down technology and the speed of private markets. i don't think that will be a successful auction. speeding up economic opportunity we have to speed up the levels of government. maybe one example where there's the obvious need to speed things up, the way we do spectrum allocations globally today is the way that we've done that for decades. we do have to cooperate
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internationally on spectrum because what one country does with the spectrum could interfere in the spectrum in the neighboring country. so we need to sit down together and agree on allegations -- allocations. three or four years. there is a big effort to do this. given the changes in what we are seeing with the increased demand of the pressure on the spectrum infrastructure it has to see how it will continue to make sense that the only time these international issues are addressed once every three or four years there are lots of examples like this and one of the things we would all benefit from an international is instead of seeing the proposals that i mentioned i think the global
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economic growth and opportunity in all of the countries that participate with be better served if we work together practically on how we speed up the government to speed up the broadband of deployment adoption, economic opportunity in all of these countries and as i said in my remarks, jerry concerned that a member of the ideas being floated would be counterproductive against the goals that articulate it from them and i'm concerned about this because unfortunately we have a world that is capable of doing things that are counterproductive. we've seen it already in the space where they're putting unplowed computing undermining the ability of countries to benefit. >> they've recently talked about relaxing the ownership and
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cross-ownership between the cross media holding companies at the same time grew up in columbia university and point that her manager of the and warned about concentration. if you look back at the radio television you typically end up in a cycle of concentration breaking up the concentration and read consolidation. is the internet different? are we not going to end up in a period of the corporate concentrated control? >> to lead to the dhaka me a very important challenge in this space is the mobile market. you know as we've talked about it so many mays mobile broadband is the future of innovation and economic growth, gdp we have a challenge in the u.s. when it comes to the global market
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structure and the u.s. was on the doorstep. i believe that we've been very dangerous for our innovation economy in the u.s. and there was a transaction that tested the rules and policies and commitment to healthy competition and we made the decision that we did and took other steps between then and now and the mobile rocket structure is moving in a much better direction now than i was then and so i think anyone that is committed to a free-market economy has to be committed to preserving competition. at the same time, of course rules adopted in different
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technological settings have the potential of becoming out of date as things change. the specific proposals we made recently were to eliminate restrictions on cross-ownership of newspaper and tv radio. it's very hard to argue that they would continue to make sense. the last point i think over time it will significantly change the analytical framework and the more traditional ownership areas and they've said this in our decision. when we get to 100% universal adoption of broadband in the u.s., the will require a different analytical framework than the one we have now where we still have about one-third of the country that don't have broadband at home and we have to
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continue to take into account. by the way i think taken into account creates positive incentives would benefit our economy because it gets a for but a running in the same direction which is driving universal broadband in the united states and i think one of the things i'm proud of is that there is no confusion about what the u.s. communication policy is organized around. it's about driving universal broadband diplomat adoption, world leading speed and capacity and the ingredients of the infrastructure that make us a magnet for innovation for years to come. estimate last question has to do it spectrum and reallocation. there's been a lot of focus on freeing up the spectrum and reallocating it to the commercial center. and i think particularly around the unused spectrum.
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talk a little bit about that. i know there is a move to release some of the spectrum and it's complicated but at the same time, i would ask the question has the defense and intelligence community accurately forecast their ten year or 15 you need for spectrum and are we making decisions about reallocating that to the private sector in the context of the potential need of the communities? as they become more connected they pick up the drone connectivity. have they predicted the need before we make decisions about reallocating it? >> in the u.s. the government military and otherwise has access to about 60% of the spectrum and about 40%. when you think about the numbers and compare the number of devices used by the government
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it's not even close, so it's hard not to look at it and think this is out of whack even taking the most aggressive projections on what the government users will need and there isn't a lot of disagreement that on the government side that is true of the commercial side, too and the policies address this is inefficient spectrum use. when the spectrum is allocated for the station's 20 or 30 years ago they were not done with the kind of efficiency optimization that we do today and that is a challenge. a couple points a these are important so give me a minute to make them. one, i am increasingly convinced that our leadership in the military services recognizes the benefits of working with us and the commercial sector to change
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the paradigm because if they're looking at increasing demand they are looking at something else, too. it's a very serious issue for people responsible for strategic planning for military services. they are looking at a rapidly growing gap between military communications devices and commercial communications devices. the gap and functionality and price. this is always -- we've known for a long time that military communications equipment cost more and did less than commercial increment but the gap compared to what it's becoming relatively narrow these devices can have 20 or 50 x more than the typical military communications device in the the conversations that we have had have been around this and around the strategic and imperative military services to adopt new strategies because the old strategies won't work to improve
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functionality and the functionality price ratio of the military equipment. one of the ways to do that is to do something that we suggested as a major policy innovation which is increased sharing of spectrum between government users and commercial users. so if you take my point before that there is a lot of inefficient spectrum use on the government side in some areas we should and clear and reallocate that spectrum, shrink down the amount of spectrum devoted and clear spectrum for commercial. we will see examples. we know the examples where it's not cost-effective for practical in the near term to do that but technology allows a greater sharing of commercial or government commercial spectrum, and we are moving rapidly together with a military service to make that idea operational, to test it on the ground in a couple of different spectrums.
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this is a big deal. last point on this. in the last 30 years in the spectrum policy there have been two major policy breakthroughs a major spectrum innovations each of which has had tremendous benefits for the economy. one was options, allocating the licenses through auctions, and the other was unlicensed spectrum. you know this is a spectrum on which wifi was built. here is my point peery. those can be the last policy innovations in our history and given the changes in the world we need to develop and put in place a new generation of policy innovations of the spectrum sharing as we talked about is one, incentive options are a way to reallocate inefficiently used commercial spectrum and free that up for the third is a new
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generation of unlicensed use so those are the three major policy innovations we are working on and we will lead the world in those three policy innovations as we did on license. these are big imperatives for the united states. >> we have time for just one question. can you bundle them? okay. very quick. all the way in the back. >> thank you mr. chairman. when you talk about open internet and preserving that today in the international states there is a lot to the policy when you first came in in 2009 on the domestic level with your net neutrality regulations. though at that point you are arguing for the rules and in this case you are arguing against and talking about your fear of certain protectionist restrictive policies and other
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countries not implementing certain types of technologies. can you explain the difference in the point of view on the domestic side? because it seems sort of contradictory. >> absolutely. the idea that the u.s. is opposing internationally is the idea of having a new layer of international internet regulation would be unprecedented and completely inconsistent with the models of a trend governments that have worked for many years. this remark that we adopted in the u.s. two and a half years ago is something that strongly supported by the internet community as this new level of internet regulation so that is our focus in the united states. it's bipartisan and it's extremely important to get so with that unfortunately i am
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getting dahuk signal from our masters so thank you very much. a very rich and i apologize we didn't have as much time for other questions on the back end but thank you for the remarks, very compelling discussion and thanks to everyone in the audience. [applause] [inaudible conversations] one
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how does one adequately express his feelings about a special friend? when that friend is also a world like on, a national hero of unimaginable proportions and a o legend whose name will live in history long after all here
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today have been forgotten >> fate looked down kindly on less when she chose him to be the first to another world and to have the opportunity to look back from space at the beauty of our own. it could have been another but it wasn't. and it wasn't for a reason. no one but no one could haveould accepted the responsibility of his remarkable accomplishment with mor ae dignity than more dy grace than her male armstrong.n. he embodied all that is good ano all that is great about america.
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>> richard land of the southern baptist convention said republicans lost the latino vote and ultimately the election during the primary. this was part of an american enterprise discussion earlier this week on immigration policy featuring the views of several self identified conservatives including the "national review." this is about 90 minutes. >> good morning everybody to get my name is nick ed schultz hit the american enterprise institute, and i'm the editor of
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theamerican.org, the aei magazine. i want to thank you for coming to the event today. conservatives and immigration reform. now what? i would like to thank my colleague daniel rothschild who had the idea for doing this event and helped bring it all together. he's had an interest in this issue for a long time as have i and i think it is timely and important and we start talking about some of these things. there's been attention on the immigration issue for at least as long as i followed politics and a lot longer than that. they are within the intellectual movement for control to define the right approach on immigration policy. this will be a generalization that i believe a fair one. on the one hand there are economic libertarians. they don't mind so much the presence of large numbers of
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immigrants here in the united states illegally in the there was also welcome much more legal immigration as well. we call this "the wall street journal" wing. on the other hand our social and law-and-order conservatives who are concerned about preserving america's unique culture and the maintenance of social order. to these conservatives, the presence of large numbers of people in the united states in violation of american law is inherently problematic. many of them are wild about the influx of large numbers of illegal immigrants either are doing that any culture need sufficient time for new arrivals to assimilate into the cultures can benefit from the pauses and immigration. there are some other camps as well, for example moral and social conservatives in the catholic church, and other religious groups who favors but might be called a light touch approach to immigration but they believe for social justice
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grounds but the broad point is that there is a detention and division on the right of emigration and there has been for decades now. the recent presidential election has brought the immigration issue once again to the center of american politics. governor mitt romney received a small percentage of latino and asian voters much less than george w. bush received and many have said his views on immigration and conservatism approach to immigration generally were to blame for the gop poor showing this time or not. it's worth noting i think that romney tried to appeal in some respects to all factions come all conservative factions on immigration. he repeatedly said that he was in favor of more legal immigration emphasizing legal, but also particularly during the primary season he took a harder line on the question of illegal immigration. what we have decided to do in
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the wake of this election is to convene a thoughtful panel of folks to discuss conservatives and immigration reform. i should note this is the american enterprise institute for public policy research. it is not the institute for figuring out how to get conservatives elected or how to get republicans elected. we are interested in finding the right solutions to public policy problems and issues and immigration is no different so i ask our panelists while the temptation in this present moment would be to talk solely about immigration and the electoral politics that's certainly an interesting and inappropriate thing to do it's more important that we make progress in analyzing the policy on immigration. it's those sound policies happened to be political winners all the better. we've seen lots of condoms and policy makers in the wake of the election offer advice such as republicans should get behind the one time and ask your republicans need to back
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comprehensive immigration reform or republicans need to start building walls and reaching out to more hispanics. maybe these are wise steps but almost all of the analysis in the wake of the election has been driven by concerns about political expediency and not necessarily because the person advocating that position believes it is a sound policy. it's not even clear to me many of the proposals are good politics either and that is something that i expect we will get into today. my hope is that in general we can do better. we must assemble the distinguished group. we have alphonso aguilar, the exhibit a stricter of the latino partnership for conservative principles. he was the first chief of the u.s. office of citizenship. appointed by president george w. bush, he was responsible for developing and promoting initiatives and programs to educate immigrants about the rights and responsibilities of citizenship and encourage their integration into american civic culture. brad bailey is the co-founder
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and ceo of texas immigration solutions. from 2000 to 2011 he was a vice president of operations for the family-owned houston area restaurants. he co-founded texas in addition solutions in 2012. the group seeks to develop and advance conservative solutions to u.s. immigration policy. he also served on the 2012 platform committee of the republican party of texas. richard land is the president of the religious liberty commission that's the southern baptist convention official entity designed to address social, moral and ethical concerns with particular attention to their impact on american families and their faith. richard is also the executive editor of a magazine dedicated to coverage of traditional religious values, christian ethics and cultural trends. and last but certainly not least, my friend ramesh ponnuru
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for the "national review" magazine and a columnist for bloomberg of view he's published articles in numerous newspapers including "the new york times," "washington post" will street journal, financial times. he is also the author and i didn't even know this until today of a monograph that aei published in 1995 called the mystery of japanese growth. he is a fellow at the institute of economic affairs in london and a media fellow at stanford university's hoover institution. thank you for joining us today. this is all this is going to work we are going to have the panel each talk for about 20 minutes and i may ask questions as we go along but we are going to leave plenty of time for questions from the audience as you are listening to the panelists please keep in mind we will have microphones the will go round leader so you can have a nice and spirited discussion. with about i'm going to start with alfonso and open up with you. thanks. >> thank you for the opportunity to be with you this morning.
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certainly i think there has been since the election some change in the political landscape when it comes to latinos and immigration and i am encouraged by that and i'm optimistic. i think next year we may actually get something done that is constructive on the issue. and talking about immigration it is kind of hard not to talk about the politics of it because frankly i believe that if we haven't been able to achieve immigration reform it's because of the politics, not because of the american people. poll after poll shows the american people want to see immigration reform and they want to see it soon for the voters security they also want to see some form of legalization, guest worker program, path to citizenship. so it's no surprise to me as
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somebody that was very involved in this election cycle back to governor romney lost the election. i think the writing was on wall and many others kept saying before the election that we have a problem with immigration, and i know that after this election there will be a lot of introspection and analysis of how to get the latino vote. but at the end, to me it was the latino vote for running and then not prevailing precisely because of the latino vote and specifically because the issue of immigration. if governor romney would have had a more constructive view on the issue from the get go from the primaries, i think he would have been a very competitive candidate and frankly i think at the end he would have ended up prevailing in the election. he didn't win contrary to apparently but he thinks not
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because latinos voted for obamacare or for entitlements. they just didn't like him because of the things he said about immigration. they remember what he said. people should self deport, something very similar to what chris would say to the secretary of state of kansas who was one of the co authors involved in the main anti-immigrant groups and in fact when he endorsed mitt romney, mitt romney went out of the way during the in primary to endorse that issue a statement saying that he was a great leader on the fight against illegal immigration. his idea was -- i don't think it was necessarily governor tommy's idea, i think that the idea of many gop establishment strategists that, you know, you run a campaign during the
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primary with restriction as being anti-immigrant, and then after the election you do what i call the old switcheroo you change and salt in your possession. the problem with that is that it's very condescending because they were listening so when you say they lost a model and after you say well i meant a nation for the state's and then you go on and say i didn't mean the entire arizonan law i just meant that a portion of it. people are like we just don't trust you. so at the end i think that a vote for obama because they didn't trust romney on the immigration question. they didn't like the rhetoric. so, and there was no reason for this because as i say, the majority of the american people want to see immigration reform and this is something very important and this shows why the politics has to do with immigration policy.
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i think the anti-immigration law has been very effective in creating the perception that the conservative base is anti-immigrant, and that's just not true. poll after poll shows study after study shows that the majority of conservatives believe in border security but also believe and immigration reform. at the latino partnership before the primary season we had the terence group and we commissioned a study to show to study the immigration views of likely republican primary voters. these are the tea party, people committed to the conservative movement as long as you have border security there they supported the legalization, they supported the path to citizenship and the guest worker program. we have included the word amnesty and when we include border secure a plus amnesty 52% of them support that idea, so
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the anti-immigration law and what i mean by the anti-immigration law i mean specifically for the immigration reform, members usa, center for into immigration studies and 06 as you know they got very involved in the political process. they influenced a small group of republicans to hijack this issue and articulate a very anti-immigrant restrictions to rhetoric which they used it republicans lost the house and the senate and for six years from 06 to 12 the republican party has been perceived as a restriction party even though in the other era all of the presidential candidates had been pro immigration. ronald reagan was for immigration reform and if you go to youtube and google the debate of 2014 you will see ronald reagan making the case not for
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legalization but for amnesty using that word. i think a majority of republicans are pro immigration that the have been afraid for the past six years about that lobby which has an incredible political machine and anybody that says anything constructive about immigration would be called the label primm st, and certainly some talk-show hosts. i think this election cycle has dramatically changed that. i can at least remember half a dozen talk shows had already said my position has evolved and now i am for immigration reform. but that is good because will give cover to a lot of republicans who have avoided this issue will want to deal with this issue to actually do it. so we have to reclaim the issue and we can do it because immigration reform is the conservative position.
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restriction is part of the nationalist protectionist paradigm and if we are the party of the family come if we are the party of the free market we should not in any way have a restriction as to position if we are for the family i don't see how -- i don't see why we should be calling for separating hundreds of thousands of families in this country, many that have been here for decades. if we are the party of the free market why should we believe the government should tell american companies that cannot find foreign workers, that cannot find american workers that they shouldn't be allowed to bring in foreign workers in an effective and timely fashion? that goes against the basic principles of the free market. so we can reclaim this issue and free met strong conservative terms as i said were the past
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party of the family for the party of the market. now what exactly this is going to look like, i don't know. i started my rounds right after i got back from d.c. going to the senate and the house and they will do something. the question is is it going to be comprehensive? i doubt it because today we know as comprehensive reform in 06 and 07 isn't necessarily what the administration is talking about. the president keeps talking about comprehensive reform. but i wonder if that comprehensive reform and was a guest worker program. at the end of that is the key to resolving this issue and the unions which the president is loyal to don't want to see the guest worker program because they don't want to see more foreign workers enter the country. they want to ensure that the
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labor market, the labor supply remains a small and the guest worker program is the key because again to grow our economy, we need to grow the industries that need that foreign work force. the last immigration reform that we had lacked the guest worker program. owls amnesty. we gave amnesty to 3 million individuals. but at that time the market had already absorbed those 3 million individuals. so what happened? the kept coming into the new jobs that america didn't want or where there was simply no americans interested in doing them. so another community from the dhaka and immigrants was created. we need a mechanism to facilitate the illegal flow of the workers that america needs, and it can be a mechanism with
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quotas set by government because at the end of the issue is an issue of the government. it's the big government saying we are going to have this program that's been to the highly regulated and some areas or for some type of jobs we are going to cap and his ridiculous quotas that don't represent the needs of the market. when you have that people are going to continue to entered illegally so what we need is the demand base guest worker program that allows companies who cannot find american workers to bring the foreign workers that they need as many as the need and we shouldn't be concerned in the economy like we have right now because if you have an economy that isn't growing you won't bring us many workers. if you have a booming economy you will bring more workers. let the market work. at the end that is the only way that we can fix this problem. in terms of the legalization i don't know exactly how that will
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be done. but what i'm seeing from my meetings in congress this will be done in a piecemeal basis rather than a comprehensive basis and at the end, i don't know if we will get for the young undocumented immigrants when they are with their parents and the so-called dreamers' i don't know if we will get to a path for citizenship for them but certainly i think for them we can probably get to a alternative gerry the idea suggested by senator marco rubio. but at the end of the day it is going to depend on the willingness from republicans but also from the president to actually sit down and negotiate and i know we've heard this a lot that it's republicans that won't want to do anything on immigration reform. nothing happened because the president didn't leave. he had a house and senate,
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democratic house and senate she didn't do anything to push their reform and engage republicans. this time again it is a complex issue you need to press the united states to do what george bush did in 2007 to send his cabinet members to congress and negotiate with the opposition leadership. if that should happen then we have a problem. so i want to see how willing the president is to negotiate with republicans. but i am optimistic. at the end i think the biggest challenge will be or the controversy will be whether we are going to get a path to citizenship or not. thank you. >> i want to thanks aei for having this and commend everyone for their work approaching the subject. i'm not a public policy guide. i'm not a washington insider i am a restaurant owner from houston texas so i can kind of
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tell you my brief experience on this but the brief political side is bacchants of timbre of last year every day at the restaurant we break bread with our staff in front of the house staff lawyers and waitresses and talk about showing of on time and putting the right amount of food on the table and not wasting. it's like our moment to hit this point, and so, after that, i had my longtime employee that has been with us for over ten years. he came to us but i would like to tell you about this person before i start to read over ten years ago he can to work for the restaurant because the previous employee wouldn't let him off on sunday to go to church with his family. a very important part to note that is wasn't the work conditions or the pay it was
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because he wanted to go to church with his family. i've worked shoulder to shoulder with him for ten years and he pulled me aside after that and asked me i have a question for you. i know you and your family are very conservative and i just want to know how you can support republicans when they ate his genex. my chest gets out and i start going through my speech of pro-family religious freedoms and he just kind of nodded his head but a couple nights later when he was attacked buy not just one but several people in the states and i watched that debate and pardon the pun didn't but houston we have a problem and they're really just kind of catapulted me to get involved and i called around to my
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politically active friends. what do we do? what do we do. and you know, one of my good friends said you are a business owner and you need to talk about this. a little bit i know how involved i would get but i pushed the state reported what for me and i'd never been to the convention my dog's name is w.. [laughter] he has a 32% approval rating but i still love him. but i just never got involved in the day-to-day. we went to this convention and i was on the republican subcommittee that really started talking about this problem, and i noticed we would get testimony from all types of people we had brought them on the subcommittee and people came in and they were physically they just couldn't stand each other they had been fighting on this issue for ten years. we had tea party groups there,
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the pro-business crowd, hispanic leaders, religious conservatives. look a lot like this panel but they really were just they did not like each other and we started talking about things you have 30 seconds. finally i said let's suspend the rules and start talking about it, and they volunteer their time on the border we all would agree i think on this panel that our immigration system is broken and in texas we over 1200 miles on the border i can tell you it's broken but no one knows more about ways we can fix this problem than the minimum militia so i yield my time and i said how we fix it? let's go. everyone started putting down their arms and their weapons and started talking about solutions. complaining about the problem
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that i feel the 2010 republican party platform and texas looked like was a lot of complaints, a lot of problems. this is wrong, this is wrong. we know it's wrong but how do we fix it? i believe in texas we fix things. we've done that with tort reform and the balanced budget amendment. our legislature meets only once every two years which washington can probably learn from. our interview policy. we fix problems, we don't complain about them and everyone started coming around. that's right we need to start doing that. as a, we cannot unified and we had a one page of how we could address our immigration problem. 50,000-foot level, but it's one page, and we went to the florida convention and i will tell you of the texas convention it's the largest gathering. there's 8,000 delegates that are at this convention. 2,000 guests and the media all
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in all. .. >> five times they came at us. five times over two-thirds of the 8000 delegates supported our solution over the rhetoric of old. that open a lot of peoples eyes that conservatives really do understand this problem.
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i believe the vocal minority has hijacked this issue and they've got a soul fighting, and they have done that on purpose. to make sure nothing happens. we want to get it fixed. it's harming our economy in texas. the federal government has failed both sides of the aisle have failed on it. so how do we fix it? when we came out of their the media comes running in two the convention and, you know, the front page of the dallas morning news, or fort worth star-telegram, gop shifts on immigration. it was amazing to see that wow, we were going to come in here and label them anti-hispanic, anti-anything. it was a total different route. vincent cable came to me, some friends of mine said we've got to take this to the national level. we went to the national platform and started talking about it.
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we got a national guest worker endorsement on the republican national convention platform which was great. thoughts my work was over, then election day hit. wednesday my phone starts getting blown up again. it's time to québec in the debate again. we need to start talking about this. i believe the free market solutions are a part of this. i believe in strong security. the anti-immigration groups will try to label us as open borders, big business wants cheap labor. i can tell you if we can fund blackwater security forces in iraq, and announcing -- some type of security force that its license in doing a good job, we need to do that. we need to secure our borders. i can tell you in texas i've been down first and seen in berks county, texas, a devastating effect it has an property owners on everything. we need to look at every option available. our national security to do so. so i'm not for open borders,
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anyway shape or form. i was an employer, as an employer i can tell you someone who uses either a fight, how broken the verified is. folks, i'm telling you right now i am all for employment verification system. we need an employment verification system, but the verified makes that a postal service looks efficient. it's a government run software program. i don't think any city more than a. it's a government run software program that needs to be modernized. as an employer, nine out of 10 businesses have a credit card trouble. you can get one on your iphone, and you can of these, master card, american express where you swipe a credit card and it tells you exactly, decline, cars and so, trachsel kind of information. i can have those type of companies, american companies take this program over and streamline and make more efficient where you get make it
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more -- i've had employees not passed e-verify and have to go to social security administration, stand in my for three days to get it corrected. that's not conservatives. how have we been spoonfed to say that a government run software program is a conserved solution? you can see people talking about it all the time. we need the free market to shows how we can do it. we need to take that over, but as an employer, the social security card is not be modernized since 1936. that blows me away. the same social security card, if we just printed the social security card on the same kind of paper we do a u.s. passport, or a 5-dollar bill, it would help the process. as an up or i can tell you some will take these documents, it's cumbersome. it's troubling. we need to look at how we address that. our temporary worker program we passed is kind of the biggest
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portion, temporary work, guest worker, what have you. it's got to be self-funding through fines and fees. it's got to be a zero budget impact item the other thing is we value the american worker as number one. only if the american worker is not available for the job will be killed by guest worker route. let me expand on that. i think the state should have these guest worker programs. for our state in texas, the texas workforce commission as an employer we lay someone off, they go to the texas workforce commission, that's what they get there unemployment, defied them, the appeal, nobody knows who is employed more than the texas workforce commission to the windows also our job critters better. if you're able to administer a guestworker program versus it coming appeared to la la land, disney world of government, it would be much more efficient run process. we need the states to give to
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administer these things and work with the federal government but streamline the process. so we make sure the american worker is number one. number one gets tight. if they are not available them ago the guest worker row. we've held out from health care issues to making sure that each employee gets each guest worker has health insurance, and also an identification card. thank you. >> brad, thank you. [applause] >> asked the moderator, if this makes me dr. phil, but anyway, richard, over to you. >> thanks. there's one thing that's quite unusual, you should have high expectations of us, all but one of us is left handed. and you have to be have to be enterprising to be victorious over the prejudices of right-handed people to remain left handed. so we are triumphant. poll after poll shows 70% of the
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american people would be more likely to support a candidate who was for comprehensive, fair and just immigration reform. unfortunately, that 70% our focus more in the middle come those are independence and those who voted democratic primaries commend those who voted republican primaries to and let's be honest, there are people in both parties who have a vested interest in solving this problem for their own political advantage. and to the detriment of the country. this issue is ringed the social fabric of the nation in ways that are far easier to rent than they are commend. and it is time that people of goodwill in this country focus on a solution that begins to mend the social fabric instead of further rendering it. and let me say very clearly, we
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need comprehensive fair and just immigration reform first and foremost. because it is the right thing to do. it is consistent with american principles. it is consistent with christian principles. if you want to see a long explanation of that i would encourage you to go to their region university law review website where my colleague and i have written a long biblical explanation of the reasons why fair, just and comprehensive immigration reform is the right thing to do. this is not a difficult problem to solve if people of goodwill will get together and solve it. i don't see how we're going to secure the border until we secure the workplace. the workplace is the magnet. as long as you have the economic disparity that you have between south america and the united states, people are going to come
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here to better themselves, to better their families futures. they will find a way to come here. they will defeat in the means that we put up to stop them. they will go over it, under it, around it. they will give you. the only way to secure the border is to secure the workplace. now i would argue that we should have a three-month period were people would have an opportunity to come forward to register, to undergo a criminal background check, and and then, and pay a fine for having broken the law. not amnesty. amnesty is what jimmy carter did to the draft dodgers who went to canada to avoid service in vietnam. they got to come him with no penalty, no fine, no anything. they just got to come home. i would have let them come home but it would have required them to work for two years in veterans hospitals at minimum
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wage, taking care of those who took their place. i would say that you say who these become for jeffrey three three-month review come for to register, to undergo a criminal background check, pay a fine. part of that fine would be used to give them a tamperproof identity card, preferably thumbprint. not a picture but a thumbprint. then you get to every american a new social security card. not the antique we've been given since 1936, but also some form of identification honor. ali a thumbprint once again, not a picture of a thumbprint. and then you say to employers, you hire someone who doesn't have either this identity card or this new social security card, and you're going to go to jail for six months. that will turn off the magnet. it will also, according to the council of foreign relations task force, which i really encourage you to go to that website and read an immigration reform, i believe it was 12%.
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12% that wages were suppressed in this country at the minimum level. wages are suppressed by 12% for the poorest among us by the competition of undocumented workers. so if we secure the workplace, wages for those who most need it will go up about 12%. because there'll be -- they're being exploited by unscrupulous employers who are using undocumented workers. that will cut down the flow by about 90% at the border. that makes it possible to secure the border for those were trying to come across for nefarious purposes, for criminal enterprises. we can stop them at the border. and then we say to those who are here in an undocumented status, you are on probation. you are paying a fine. and this is to be the most i find when i talk to people the most emotional issue in all of this. is language.
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i find americans across the generations don't want us to have to sing the national anthem into languages at the world series. they want the national anthem sung in english but even if all the ballplayers are latin american. so they have to agree, if they want to stay here permanently, they have to agree to learn to read write and speak english. i find among the undocumented workers they have no problem with this. they want to learn english. they understand that to live the american dream they learned how to speak and understand standard language -- english. then you have a sliding scale where you say to people, if you've been here 20 years, and some of them have been, and by the way, we've had two signs at
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the border for the last 20 years. one says no trespassing together with says help wanted. yes, it's wrong to break the law. it's also wrong and immoral not to enforce the law for 20 years and then retroactively say now we are going to enforce the law. the way i explain it is it would be like the federal government sending me a bill saying we haven't given you a speeding ticket for the last 20 years, but we been monitoring your driving habits on the highways, and we've noticed you consistently break the speed limit on the interstate, which i do. as a texan is my right to aim my car, not drive it. [laughter] eighty-five miles an hour now in parts of texas the speed limit. amen. now, and they sit by the way we're going to give you a fine for every time you have broken the law for the last 20 years, and we're going to confiscate your car into a debate of
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hundred i've had to go to the bank to get a loan. and i would think i've been treated unfairly. it's unfair to not enforce law for 20 years and then say retroactively we're going to enforce the law now. that's immoral. it's just immoral. we say to be put into a long time, you're on probation for four years, for five years, and then you have permanent legal status. that once they get from the legal status, simply to be able to get citizenship. but permanent legal status will get us to cover his immigration reform faster to get it would eliminate one of the major political pearls to get us there. and we need to have a guestworker program. wended guestworker program. i think it's better to have them run by the states where you would have an opportunity, if you offer a job and a wage, and for 30 days no one takes a, then you can go to paris proved pool of people who want to come into the job and they can come in and do the job for a certain amount
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of time. and then you have to offer that job again to someone, if an american worker does not want it, then you let come you give it to someone else. it's also in our enlightened self interest to cover his immigration reform. i would want to can encourage you to go to the council on foreign relations website and see the task force report. it was co-chaired by jeb bush and mac mcwhirter. that points out the country is going to lead the world in the 21st century economically is going to be the country that can amass the largest mass of brain power. no matter where it was born. to do its research in its country. we started off with a head start because we're a nation of immigrants. but their other countries that are competing with us. anybody who gets a ph.d and a hard science from american university. i don't care where they were born, we ought to staple a green
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card to their diploma. and encourage them to do the work here. if we want america to be a country that leads the world in research an and in innovation in the 21st century. and as an american i want that to be the united states. this is an issue that can be solved. the american people are way ahead of where their elected representatives are. and i look at the composition of this room, and there is a generation gap. i find that the older people are, the less receptive they are to immigration reform. the younger they are, the more receptive they are the immigration reform. and i have a column in the christian post that i would encourage all of you to read called the night the gop began to lose the 2012 election. and that was the night that governor rick perry got booed by
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the audience they're not just mistreated by the candidates, but booed by the audience. for defending in state tuition for the children of undocumented workers in texas. which passed in 2001 with only five state legislators voted against it. do you not difficult it is to get all but five texas state legislators to agree on anything? it's almost impossible. they won't even agree on what time the sun came up. but they agree to this legislation because it was right for texas. it was right for the show people. this is the low-hanging fruit. these young people have done nothing wrong. they have broken no law. they are here because of their parents actions, and i don't believe the united states of america is a country that wants to punish children for their parents behavior. these young people want to be americans.
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they want to improve themselves and be contributed to our economy. and it is immoral for us to put barricades in their path. and, frankly, as a republican, and i was ashamed of my party for their behavior that night. they out to apologize. i can understand why hispanics would say, republicans don't like us. that's not true. but you wouldn't know it from the behavior of that crowd that night. and it's time that we, frankly, i'm going to make a judgment call here, frankly it's time for us to quit listening to the people with the smallest brains and the biggest mouse. [applause] -- mouth. spent next up is a person with an enormous brain -- [laughter] that's ramesh. >> not as big as my mouth however. thank you. thank you all for coming out here. a lot of the themes and concerns
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with how to -- have been discussed here. matters heavy do with economics and morality, and politics. so i figured what i would do is talk little bit about an issue that i think tends to get a little undersized in these conversations about immigration. that is assimilation. people mean different things when they use that word. what i mean in saying that our immigration and post-immigration policies ought to be oriented towards assimilation is simply that we should want newcomers to the united states to have a good shot and become successful americans who can support themselves rather than rely on taxpayers, who can't and do fully participate in local, state and national political that operations, willing to produce the inner culture and who see themselves and are seen by others as americans.
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these are things we should while. these are things we should take steps to achieve. assimilation shouldn't in my view means the elimination of what's distinctive about immigrant cultures. when i had mine is compatible with immigrants changing and ideally enriching a national culture. but the important thing is that newcomers and nativeborn americans alike have shared sense of belonging, consider their interests to become interest rather rather than and tested -- antagonistic and be able to communicate with one another. immigration policy that takes assimilation as one of its watchwords would i think look different in important respects, both somewhat we currently have and from some of the proposals that we often hear about. i think it's obvious assimilation is a gold that we want to make as much of our immigrant inflow to be legal rather than a legal, l.a. county on the part of a large
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population. -it also stands to reason we should be mindful of the fact that is easy to assimilate an immigrant population the more diverse character, unless it's dominated by immigrants in one particular place. and also it is easier for smaller the info is. and it's also i think stands to reason that we can successfully absorb more immigrants, the more care we take equipment immigrants with the skills they need to make it in the u.s. for example, as richard mentioned, by making sure that they and their children receive effective english language is instruction. we tend to talk a lot about what to do about illegal immigrants who are already here, whether to provide them with what some people call their legalization and other people call amnesty. and on both sides a lot of the arguments are moral.
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one group suggesting legalization would erode the rule of law and another saying the status quo that undermines the rule of law and besides, we have a humanitarian duty to regularize the status of the people who come in over the last few decades. well, my own reading of the polls is that the answers that people get a lot of questions depend a lot on the workings of the questions, which suggests to me that these polls are useful for identifying some impulses that are strong within the public, and not so much for finding specific policies. the impression i have from looking at the goals is that most people are not opposed in principle to allow people who have been here for many years and meet certain other conditions to give legal status. but i also think that most people don't feel obligated to provide this legal status if
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there's a danger that provide it will yield more illegal immigration in the future. if that is, it won't just form part of a cycle of an ineffective and fundamentally unserious national policy. a lack of trust in federal governments and international politics means to me to have been and continue to be the most serious obstacle achievement of an immigration policy that quite looks like it ought to have a census behind. the more people have confidence in enforcement, confidence in enforcement both the border and as richard said at the workplace, the more i suspect they would be willing to support legalization, amnesty are, or whatever you want to call it. and i think that consensus would include an awful lot of conservatives. but what strikes me as more problematic in principle than earned legalization, and a lot
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of proposal here about immigration reform, is the idea of temporary work authorizations. and i think we can all understand the impulse. you want to meet the need of business for workers, especially for jobs that most americans are not interested in taking. and the same time you don't erase the hackles of those americans who don't want as much aggression. but i'm deeply skeptical that these proposals can work. for example, if temporary workers who are here have children while they're here, children you would be u.s. citizens under prevailing interpretations of the constitution would we really deport the parents? or with the same considerations that many people, view as harsh under current conditions latest to flinch from enforcement and those conditions as well? all of the arguments about family custom not breaking up families would apply in such cases. if e-verify doesn't work as i
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often hear from proposed of immigration reform, well, why would we expect the federal government to do a great job of running a background checks and enforcing the time limits and that that kind of policy would entail? but beyond these practical concerns i also fear that this policy sends a message, and the particular message to hispanics that we want to benefit from their labor but we don't want you to be full participants in american life. and we definitely don't want you to have political power. that is an anti-assimilative message. it is typically 10 conservative immigration reformers of the most positive about temporary work programs and it's been the labor left has been most opposed to it with the latter argument that having a large group of workers without full rights is a step backwards for civic ideals. i'm a conservative and i'm not often in sympathy with labor but this seems to me to be a
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reasonable argument it seems to me the fact, a correct argument. it's no secret that conservatives have long been divided about immigration and the election results have brought this issue to the floor. i don't expect it to resolve these differences here, but as someone who finds himself in between the major conservative camps on this issue, let me make a couple of suggestions towards bridging the gap. for the enforcement only folks, i think the most important thing i would have to say is, it is crucial in what you say and what you propose that you acknowledge how reasonable and understandable it is that people who break the law to come here to build better lives for themselves and their families. you don't have to believe that's the right thing to do but you don't have to believe that government should allow it to see this point. i don't think some of the people on this side of the debate see how easily their condemnation of illegal behavior can come across as personal hostility to illegal
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immigrants, and even to hispanics and asians in general. it's much better to stick to a cheek of institutions and policies rather than a people i think on this issue. for the folks who want comprehensive reform, i'd say take seriously the concerns people have expressed about enforcements and sometimes unexpressed concerns they have about assimilation. a couple people have mentioned rick perry. let's not forget, i think a basic principle but if you want to persuade people who do not already agree with you to come around to your position, calling them heartless may not be the way to go about it. don't approach this as a purely economic issue. don't approach it as a matter of maximizing the vote share of one party or another. a temptation by the way under have to say it was avoided, has been avoided on this panel. family values, economic, the rule of law, national cohesion,
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these are all good conservative themes. they need to be all respected and brought into alignment with one another. thank you ipod back. >> ramesh, thank you very much. i want to go to the audience for questions in just a second, but i will take the moderator's prerogative to ask a question of the panel. and i'm going to break the rule that i said out of the very beginning. i want to talk politics or one second. which is, i worry that in the wake of governor romney doing so poorly among hispanics that it just seems so obvious that republicans and conservatives may want to change how they approach the immigration issue. and while i can't certainly know that this is true, i always suspected that governor romney wasn't really sort of deep down
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inside a hard line on immigratioimmigration the issuee across your i think there was a question of he had to win his party's primary, and he calculated accordingly and crafted a policy approach and a rhetorical approach in keeping with it. now, nothing has happened even since the election would seem to be necessary to have changed that fact for republicans who need to win their party's nomination in order -- he's shaking his head, and that's fine. but i'm wondering if any of you would choose to comment on that fact, that this is a reality or at least a reality of winning the party's nomination. >> well, i mean, i guess it's going back, now that we're going through this introspection, people say we need to understand which of the we have to begin by understand our own conservative
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base, and i think we saw in the primary where, i will give you example, newt gingrich. his approach to immigration was actually pretty good. it was constructed. and remember that last debate of 2011 where he said, he confronted michele bachmann and he said if you're for the countywide you want to support -- exports when people. we need to find a commonsense approach to do with this issue. and dissembling to take the heat. he didn't go down in the polls after he said that. he actually searched. he ended up winning south carolina. the restriction us would like to argue that governor perry went down in the primary because of his position on immigration. he went down because we all know he had some problems with the debates. spent which had to do with medication he was taking, back surgery. i mean, he's not the most -- >> right. but the whole point is that --
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>> that's going to be the new republican campaign slogan. speed up when you -- >> when you run a primary, you will have some in the conservative base that will be angry about having a position on immigration but you're not going to lose the primary because of immigration. and i think that's where we started the problem is that everything that the candidates were being fed from the very top, because i remember how he acted when newt came out saying that the minority do. it's not a minority view. >> i was going to say, you know look, you have to understand that if you are speaking out on immigration reform and you're in favor of it you're going to get this tidal wave of manufactured astroturf. it really is astroturf. that it appears to be grassroots. when i came out on this, i got
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attacked. we got like 3000 e-mails in my office, all the same e-mail by the way. generated by this grassroots organization, that then started his campaign attacking me because of eye, after all, was a member of the council of foreign relations. you know, you just have to buck up and say okay, shut up. and continue. i got attacked for coming out in favor of immigration reform, and encouraging my denomination to do immigration reform, and then lo and behold we got to our convention, which is thousands of people elected by their local churches to come and represent their churches from all across the country, and in 2011, in phoenix, we voted 80%-20% in favor of comprehensive immigration reform or the southern baptist convention one
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of the most conservative evangelical denominations in the country. i think that the republicans, and those who want republicans to win need to understand that there are highly organized groups that have a vested interest in fomenting anti-immigration feeling. and the only way to defeat them is to confront them, and to shame them. chain them. you know, as far as i'm concerned rig dairy was being charitable when he calls those who booed heartless. i can think of other less terrible names they could've been called. as a historian i would say folks, and nativists have lost every one of these debates, from the revolutionary period until
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now, they have lost every one of these debates. if you want to be on the losing side, just be a nativists. >> well, i think you know, it's a recent trend. our party has long been this way. you go back to then governor bush and how he went into hispanic community didn't pander to them during election time. he didn't, he china when he met with his broken spanish and tried to speak to them. you know, and uploaded the board of commissioner katy that in 2000. he did that in 2004 advocate 44% of the vote. in texas he got 49% of the vote. working shoulder to shoulder with many hispanics, i can tell you that they don't like pandering even. they don't enjoy the political process, and we need to be a party that learns from that. but was recently happen is exactly what doctor land said,
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these groups are highly financed, highly funded, that infiltrated the conservative movement, they got us all stirred up a fighting. and their solution is no, no, no. keyport, deport, before. its population could do. it's the environment is their god, and they don't have anything in common with them. they get a couple of people they pay out in front to be there fair-haired conservative credentials individual, but if you really start getting back lives of the onion it will make you cry. it's not conservative at all. so they have hijacked the party on the issue and they got a fighting on this issue to so much of people, national conservative authors are claiming that immigration issues one of the conservative principles. it's like since when did this become a conservative principle? when you use our conservative principles to address this problem, not complain about the
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problem. i think that is what's happened of recent, and as such is not trying to win elections but it's trying to grow the party and welcome people. and i'm the hospitality. we are welcoming you to be there. we're wanting you to feel like you're at home. as a party we need to learn from the. we need to do in the anti-immigration rhetoric of that has been displayed doing more damage than it is good. >> ramesh, do you have a comment? >> sure. look, i should practice i remarked on this by saying i am in complete agreement that conservatives and republicans need to do better job, or in some cases a job for the first time of trying to appeal to hispanic voters and other nonwhite voters. but i think we should not kid ourselves about some of the obstacles. we need to start with an accurate look at some of these number's. we should look, for example, the
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fact that the claim that bush got 44% of the hispanic vote in 2004 was subsequently retracted. he got something closer according to exit pollsters, 38-40%. stupider than 29 that lets you some accurate numbers. and lets also not kid ourselves that hispanic voters are voters who care first, foremost and only about immigration and that once you solve that problem, you're going to win this vote. it may be something that helps you have an open door where they will listen to the rest of your message. i'm not suggesting otherwise. but polls have also shown most hispanics favor the president health care law. they give a different answer than the one conservatives do to the exit poll question about the want a bigger government with more services, or smaller government with fewer services. they want a much higher in pashtun in which the on issue
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after issue these are voters who just disagree with conservatives on a lot of policy issue, although talk about well funding, they are certain well-funded or stations that come up with that on the other side of it. i would just point out, you know, reagan not only was welcoming of immigrants. he enacted amnesty in 1986 when people at the time were willing to call an amnesty. and in 1998, 29% of the hispanic vote. so again, i hear from people i respect, that this is the magic key, and it isn't. and the last i would just point out one of the problems that republicans had in this election was not just a bad showing among hispanics by the fact that a lot of white working-class voters did not turn out to vote. and it seems to me that if you're trying to figure out what to do about that problem as a
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republican, coming out for anything they can be described as amnesty would not be at the top of your list. again not to suggest that they should be changes in the republican approach to immigration policy, and outreach to different groups, but i'm hearing a lot of illusions and naïveté about is the easiest going to be. >> i think it's important to note we always look as a party of, you know, who are we and hispanic outreach and things. senator ted cruz, we've got a hero in marco rubio that is leading this fight. we've got governor martinez in new mexico. we've got brian sandoval, governor in nevada. these are people who are leaders in our party right now, right now. so they connect with what our beliefs are. they generally connect what our police are but this issue of immigration i believe in the
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last eight to 10 years has become third world politics in our party. where you don't want to talk about it. when mitt romney got into debates about immigration it was like very awkward but he's like what i do with my hands, you know? we've got to talk about. that's what marco rubio leads the charge of every time he talks about anything he talks to immigration, and that is what our party needs to talk about. it's an issue we can't avoid. >> we're going to go to the audience here. just a couple ground close to ask that you wait for a microphone to come around. and that you state your question in the form of a question. so we have a question right here and then we'll go there next. >> hi. outlooks from the cato institute. there seems to be some disagreement on the panel about whether guestworker visas are good way to go forward or not. and ramesh concept from an assimilationist point of view and bread comes out from this is a good way to work it, they can
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come in legally, take some strain off the black market entry, provide businesses what they need. it seems like most hispanic immigrants that the history of the states who have come in is a circular circular flow but they would come in for five, 10, 15 years, they want to work, go back to their home countries with her savings. since we're not going to get a massive increase in green cards to make up for the number of hispanic workers who come in, why can't guestworker programs fill this more effectively? at september social something that can work well given how it is a circular flow spent i think it can. the cfr report showed that 30% of the people who are here in an undocumented status don't want to stay here permanently. and they want to come here, make money and then go home and open a garage in monterey for the same reason that a lot of our
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retirees are moving to mexico. because he american dollar goes a lot farther, at least right now. in mexico than it does in the united states. and if we had a portrait of matagorda we controlled in the people with guestworker cards and they could go back and forth and so they would be risking their lives to go home and visit their families, you would have more of these people who would come here, working for a certain number of years and then go back to the country of origin and want to retain their ties there. i mean, 30% of the people that are here in undocumented status didn't come here to stay firmly and don't want to stay here permanently. and so i think that that works for them. i do think assimilation, if we had a legal immigration policy that worked and gave a pathway to legalization for the undocumented, they would begin to assimilate at the pattern, at the rate that former immigrant groups have assimilated.
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the undocumented so are not assimilating at the same rate because they have to stay in the shadows. they are subject to exploitation by unscrupulous people who prey upon them. and they are not the senate as quickly as previous immigrant groups have been assimilated. >> i think he is a term that is important as we begin the discussion which is circular migration. and that's something that that's what the problem in. doctor land address the issue of those who come here who don't want to stay, they stay here because it's to go back would mean leaving and then reentering illegally. so they end up here. but let's also look at the guestworker program, not only as a function of the needs of our economy it is also profoundly approach. do you know how many families broken up in mexico and in central america a people who come here to work, leave their
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spouse, their children back home and then they never seem. they may send, have a commitment to send remittances back then they start families are into training. it's breaking up families. so i think we can't guarantee for every single foreign person enters the u.s. a path to citizenship. so i think that we have to adopt this circular migration is a lot of people perhaps a majority wanting to come here to work, to return to the country. but we have to make it flexible so when you're done with the job i can go back to mexico and then we enter for the next season of work. but i think it has to be flexible. and asked to be reflecting the needs of the market. it is precisely the unions who make this argument that the guestworker program is some sort of indentured servitude that the only way we can allow immigrants if we give them a path decision she. that is ridiculous.
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we can get a path to citizenship to avoid entering tonight increasing the number of green cards, i am not sure we are not going to get to that discussion as well. governor romney, for example, a proposal he made in the primary which nobody paid attention to was doing away with the quotas for the immediate -- immediate relatives of prominent residents. that's perhaps an approach, but i think that's something we have to consider as well, increasing the number of green cards to facilitate more legal migration and allowing people to be here permanently. >> it also comes down to this dates as ramesh said earlier about feds not being effective running against worker back wrenching it but i think we also need to look out the states look at the driver's license apartment all over texas. where the facilities and means to be able to do this.
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states works folks a lot better than this town works. go home for thanksgiving and state the week. i promise you it comes apparent kind of gets gridlocked, but it's not just about getting a cheap labor. i believe in assimilation portion, but when you to start with that and create a way to become citizens where they can vote and they can become citizens but that's a debate when it have it our was done at the 50,000-foot level. but we need to make sure that we have this discussion and start with solutions versus the rhetoric. >> i think that when you just witnessed a first of which is somebody at aei holding of the d&d as an example of efficient government at work. [inaudible] >> i guess he really is like a whole nother country. [inaudible] [laughter] look, it may be that folks who
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are skeptical of these comprehensive reform plans are just ignorant and heartless, and summa also diabolically well-funded. but i think the folks who are for these sorts of reforms have to stop and listen to themselves, and think, you know, if i'm saying this is all going to result in the circular migratory floor and is all going to work a perfect and is not going to become an is going to be perfectly administrative a feasible and yes, we will have the political will to enforce the limits on the guestworker program when we haven't had the political will to do so yet, and the fact our lack of the same is one of the major reasons we have for arguing for this, maybe people are just not going to quite buy it. and the other think i would say is if we talk about the politics of it, the temporary worker program, if the impetus here is a large part as a political problem for conservatives and republicans, that cannot
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possibly be the solution to it. because you will be instantly outflank. they will be an argument that says you want to folks who work hard here and you don't want him to become citizens, you don't want them to become voters, you don't want them to full political rights. that's not going to be a winning message. you're always going to be looking like you're stingier and more hostile to hispanics, and what's more, that argument is correct. and that's what it's going to have that fight. >> okay. we have a question you and they will come down to this gentleman here. >> i from george washington university. my question goes really not to the cheap labor or to the highly qualified ph.d holding member, but rather someone that went to undergrad to a midwinter grad school and is trying to find a place in society but it's always attached to it simply as. that's what i see is the most cruel part of the immigration system which is your always
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attached to your employer. you lose your freedom of movement and you lose part of the free market of labor that americans have and take it for granted. instead of having a have to attached to your citizenship, is having her permanence in the country being attached to your employer. how do you address this person that is not in the lower tier but not also in the top care but is just like the average, just middle-class type of person that is what is a part of makes? >> a part of a permanent residency process, we have two mechanisms, which is family-based immigration visa, or employment-based. so even those who come here to
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work, they could be positioned as immigrants and eventually become citizens. the question is perhaps we need more immigrant bases -- visas for workers. one of the interesting things that happened in the last congress, which again was not reported because republicans are bad and anti-immigrant was a bill introduced by congressman chaffetz of utah, which passed the house by a vote of 385-15. i have seen that type of bipartisanship since, on immigration in a very long time. what it did was it did away with the quotas for employment-based -- the country base limit quotas for emplased immigrant visas, and for family-based, it increased them, it doubled them. so i think there is room here because we do need people with
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advanced degrees in normal, if it's an employment-based job, i think we need to increase that number so there are more employment visas available so more can become permanent residents and eventually citizens. >> if i could also say, i completely agree with the breath of your question but i think the linkage to a particular employer is deeply problematic part of this policy. i think if you want an immigration policy that meets u.s. economic needs, they need what you do is cut back on the use of immigration to reunite extended families, and increased skills come a skilled immigration and not have it so tied to particular employers, precisely to serve the cause of the labor market.
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>> one of the things the council on foreign relations task force did you, we wrestled with this, was cut back on extended families and give it a new quick am is because the numbers just get astronomical. otherwise. and opens it up for the kind of thing you're talking about, the whole system is broken and needs to be fixed. i think we need to understand something. we are a unique country. we are the only country in the world that is a creedal country. anybody can become an american. if they're willing to pledge allegiance to the secular creed, laid out in the declaration of independence, they can become americans and century can become english or french. if i lost my mind i could probably go through all of the legal provisions and become a citizen of france. that, thank god, which still not make me a frenchman. you know, anybody can go through the legal provision and become an american.
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and the great thing about our country i lived in thinking for three years, and i enjoyed it, but compared to america, england is a really boring place. and the reason is everyone of our immigrant groups that have come to this country, even the ones that were brought here forcibly, i mean, jazz, our cuisine, our language, everything has been enriched by every immigrant group that has come. they have contributed to our culture. and we are not saying that you should suppress the. we have columbus day parade for italian americans. we have polish-american bridge. we have include a mile in texas. we even have anglo-american celebration i had reported say what's it look like? i said if you ever been to the american revolution meeting? it's a commemoration. as long as -- it has to be on the right.
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you're an italian-american. you're in anglo-american. hispanic american. and i talk to someone from germany last year who chose to become an american, and i said why. he said, you have so much more freedom here. in germany, there are tremendous expectations about what you're supposed to do and how you're supposed to behave, based on your family background. here you are free. we want people who yearn for that freedom to come to deny states. they always have that we want him to continue to do so. it's what makes us americans. >> we have a question down here. may be if you could answer questions in hand the microphone and will try to take both questions. >> i'm a canadian working in u.s. on an h-1b1 visa, a process which i wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. and compared to my visa, it was
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approved overnight. my question was how would you address the reform for those who want to come to the u.s. to work? i would agree with your point, boost economy and pay taxes in the american tradition the would we have to only get the job if there was none for an american in which case i wouldn't be able to be here. and i would just point to research by the cato institute which mentions that immigrants, there is signals for the con and boost wages for all, all levels. thank you very much. >> go ahead and ask the question and then we will address both of them. >> okay. i'm a first generation immigrant, which basically means i have to be a democrat. so my question is, so my know
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what to do more to the political seriousness. you all intend to where the republican party is going and everything. how can the republican party become a big party again for what it was during the reagan? i feel the republican party is to slowly and slowly and slowly becoming a smaller and smaller and smaller party. and basically throwing people out like me or other republicans, you're not a real republican, or things like that. democratic party is going the opposite direction. as they were the small party and very slow in the '80s and the late '70s, now they are the inclusive party, bringing in latinos, bringing in, well, blacks before in the bring in all these other groups. how can the republican party kind of switch and start be more of an inclusive party? >> why do we take the first question first. come back and close on the last one. >> the h-1b1, the whole process
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is like i said totally toted broken. i would like to give an example, the entire agriculture committee, the entire kennedy from growing fruits and vegetables to working, anything. thousands and thousands of visas are applied for. less than 2% of the entire workforce is approved on a piece. a lot of it is feasible and migratory. while major league baseball who has a 50% foreign-born workforce can 100% of their visas are approved. who does more for the american economy? baseball or the agriculture industry. that their shows how broken our system is. we've got to make sure that -- are so many jobs available. last of us watching a program in which the skilled workforce instrument is the to him that time of high skilled software computer out of a skilled labor is an issue we need to look at, our entire coach but having immigrants come to our country
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like dr. land said, it's really is were country is about and how it was founded. this is a discussion we need to have and look for, but currently right now i've talked to many people, especially in georgia, how cumbersome it is. and how it works. we need to streamline that and make a more efficient to my personal opinion is i think states can help a lot with that and cut the red tape of the federal government. >> can i respond to the second one? it seems to me that the republican party is the party that is far more tolerant of dissension in the democratic party is. i remember bob casey not being allowed to speak them a bob casey senior not be allowed to speak at the democratic convention because he was pro-life. we have pro-life and pro-choice republicans. many a pro-life democrat other than bob casey, jr. we have pro-life, we have pro-traditional marriage republican. and we have homosexual and lesbian republicans. name me a pro-traditional
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marriage democrats, national figure. you know, the democratic party never has been since the new deal a collection of interest groups. and, and ethnicities. and republican party has been the sort of the big tent party but i think it still is the big tent party. the question is, and i think where it's lost its way is, it has now made people like governor romney who is a really nice guy, and who i think would have been a pretty good president. but as george will system he speaks conservatism as a second language. i mean, you know, i'm severely conservative. nobody who's conservative who is really a conservative has ever said i'm severely conservative. i mean, that's just an oxymoron. like humble, texas. it's an oxymoron.
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there's nothing wrong with republican party. that better candidates had better messaging wouldn't solve. i mean, you know, i think marco rubio would be a wonderful hispanic version of ronald reagan. >> let me quickly on the h-1b, i think the problem with the frustration sometimes it's not necessarily, i know they can be a problem with processing, but with the cap. right now is 61, 65. again, we need more than 65,000 h-1b people with advanced degrees, absolutely. that is the problem. ..
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part of the immigration discussion and the anti-immigrant lobbyists wanted to do was to scare republicans by saying that latinos will never be republican. i heard some other comments ramesh made, and i can't disagree with him more because it is something i hear so many times about latinos and. it just shows a lack of intent
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for the community. latinos are entrepreneurial as a national average latinos are people of faith. the majority of latinos have the right to life by 56% compared to about 40% of the rest of the population they voted for the proposition 8 in california. we are extremely conservative 20 or 30 years ago and new york and chicago and those in the southwest who've been in the u.s. since the u.s. basically took half of mexico with an of
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the population which is 40% foreign-born, and the rest of the children of immigrants fifth i know when asked about government they may give answers that are not extraordinary but sometimes we get tinkled and caught up in the polls and we've certainly seen in this election cycle and besides pulling those specific issues if we have a better understanding of where they are coming from you get a better understanding of why they are asking that. but i believe with the latino community we lost the latino vote because of immigration. if we had a better position on immigration, from the get go, from the primary governor romney would have been competitive and he would have been in those battleground states with the latino vote decisive, and finally, we have to stop being rockefeller republicans. we are not the party of the 47%.
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when governor romney said what he did last week that obama won because of the gifts to latinos and voter minorities that's insulting. they didn't vote for obama because of obamacare. i think that he's engaging obama in the same type of class warfare discussion that obama wants to have and i think we have to go back to the conservative populism of ronald reagan which is to talk about the economy but let me say something else -- we cannot run only on the economic message. we have to be full conservatives on social issues, the national security. >> and aspirational americanism where you are free to go as far as you want to do and to do when you want to do, and you're absolutely right that the hispanic community especially
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they are very on japan real and when they start small businesses guess what they start liking the government less. >> unfortunately we are out of time so i want to thank you for coming today and join me in thanking the panelists for this terrific discussion. [applause] the fiscal conservative was perhaps best known for his work on the balanced budget act which provided for automatic spending cuts, if the deficit succeeded at an agreed upon limit. after the senate career, he was approached by president clinton to meet treasury secretary, an
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opportunity that he declined. he was 82-years-old >> how does one adequatelypresss express his feelings about a special friend? when his friend is also a worldd icon, in national hero of unimaginable proportions and a legend whose name will live in history long after all here today. kiny fate looked kindly on us when she chose him to be the first t venture to another world. to hat and we have the opportunity to look back to space at the beauta of our own what.
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it could have been another but it wasn't and it wasn't for a reason.o, no one but no one could haveepth accepted the responsibility of his remarkable accomplishment with more dignity and more grace than meal armstrong he embodies all that is good and all that is great about america
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president obama's keen campaign manager attended a breakfast this morning. you can see all of his remarks at 6 p.m. eastern on the companion network, c-span. here is a briefly get some of his comments. >> the world had changed and technology and in their world all the things it changed drastically in four years i went to see a bunch of people to blow up the a late campaign and was
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an interesting way to think about the campaign and the day the president offered me the job i said i need you to promise me it isn't going to be like 2008 again. he said what are you talking about? we won that one. if we run the same campaign we did last time we will get beat me to run a new campaign because of technology because a whole bunch of things. >> so, we -- he made the single most important decision which was in chicago and i think there was a crucial moment for the campaign. the campaign was having
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different time zones exacerbated. how did this work? >> it worked because you have a whole bunch of folks that spent all day every day sitting in an open space in chicago and build a brand new campaign. the reason i knew it was going to work was in august of 2001 during the debt limit deal. they just completely focus on building and all day we didn't have you poking and prodding us and we were able to just spend a year building a whole bunch of things that are helpful on the ground to spend 15 hours a day every day for 18 months building a grass-roots campaign as the
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president and lawmakers continue to talk about the so-called fiscal cliff and the tax breaks and spending cuts, grover norquist founder and president of americans for tax reform is calling for all negotiations to be open and aired on c-span. mr. norquist is known for promoting his tax increase pledge to the gop lawmakers. this man for rum is hosted by the center for national interests. >> there may be some breaches we will do the next time. >> he talked about taxes, about u.s. economic policy, but it was about taxes in the electoral campaign. we had elections in the tax
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center for very important political debate and at the center of the negotiations between the obama administration and the congress particularly the republican controlled house of representatives. and as i watched the president during his recent press conference as the recent leaders of the house i think everybody agrees that it would be highly desirable to each to compromise and they also agree buddy elections provided a mandate. but the president seems to think he is the one who got the mandate and that the republicans are saying well, yes, mr. president and how do you reconcile the two mandates? and how do you reach an
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agreement and what are the consequences of failing to do so? this is one of the most important issues facing the administration, the congress and the nation. >> several months ago i said there are two options for after the election. if romney is elected he would have the republican senate to go along with the republican house what would that happen is they would pass the plan taking corporate individual taxes to 25% top rate having a territorial tax system rather than a worldwide tax system and on the spending side deutsch the plan that is entitlement reform while the means tested programs would be block granted, and the medicare would be premium support, and this would drop from obama's spending to about $6 trillion over the next decade and put you on track towards a balanced budget. that's still the republican plan
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for when they have the house but they didn't get either the white house or the senate in this election so that option moves off until you have a different president and a different set. where are we now? now we have the republican house, you have obama be elected in the senate with a democrat majority that has enough republican votes to filibuster. what happened was we got the status quo. in 2008 obama won by seven points against a war hero and triggered 56 democrats led by nancy pelosi in the senate and 59 and than 60 democrats in the house 59 to 60 democrats and the senate supermajorities in both houses looking ahead from the
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2008 election losing four senate seats when you look at 2010 there was no democrat they thought was vulnerable and those you thought might not come back so the democrats were looking at 60 seats for some time. but then we have 2010. the republicans took the house with the reagan republican majority, not just the republican majority, and this isn't something much more than new gingrich had or hastert enough to filibuster anything he wanted to. they hoped of 2012 was that if we did a slow straight line from 2008 to 2010 and in 2012 we win the presidency and the senate
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gave up the republican house was a fluke these were amateurs, not pros. when they came back we had these competing imperatives you talk about in the mandates obama wins with a shrunken margin and it reveals has won a second term and got a larger margin of victory than before. ronald reagan doubled his and even bush increased his and plant and increased his by six points. obama went from seven down to three and got 8 million fewer votes total. a little tough to see the mandate compared to say ronald reagan's second term or bush or clinton second term. but you also have the challenge that all presidents are lamb ducks as soon as they get reelected. if you get the president of the beginning of his term she might be there for eight years and if you need something from the
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white house or you fear the white house you have eight years having to deal with that problem not just obama but any. and the republican house they say we have a majority and we ran against the tax increases and we ran on maintaining the bush will were tax rates for everybody so we have a mandate, too and the republican mandate in the house is interesting because the democrats when they got the majority in the house and 06 and 08, they had to landslides but the republicans only got one landslide but the republicans got their landslide in 2010 the year when everybody that as redistricting for the next decade so the democrats won the house for four years and the republicans then it's pleased to see them announced today they have the house for the next decade as you move forward part of that when you look at this in the republicans' second argument
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is the mandate is and all obama's but the recollected the house. red states have the republican governor in both houses and legislature republicans. 24 of them. 14 states have a democratic governor and a democratic legislature. these are the people who redistricted themselves and they tended to be in california and illinois with a redistricted against republican incumbents and the republicans redistricted pennsylvania, ohio, indiana, michigan and wisconsin to protect and maintain their gains in those states so the people you thought might be swept out in the receding tide were not. the republicans not only had a likely ten year run in the house because of redistricting they also want a mandate was interesting. they endorsed the plan and remember there's the upstate new
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york republican who lost and they said we ran some ads about medicare. this is the silver bullet republicans have touched the third real you discussed entitlements and we will not destroy you all. so you have actually veteran republicans back now all of whom had to answer a hundred questions about the plan and about block granting and means testing entitlements about medicare and the new guys had to face the same question. so i would argue that you have a republican party that not only touch the fence rail of the politics but finally at great length didn't end up where all the smart people knew you would in devotee discussed entitlement reform and actually passed the bill so you have ten years of republican house committed to these reforms which would balance the budget and bring new entitlement reform all the things people wondered about how did we ever do this.
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republicans actually passed a budget on the subject in the house and they haven't even bothered to write a budget and his budget doesn't do any of the things you want a budget to do over the next decade and it didn't get any votes in the house or the senate so those are the two competing mandates and to i think obama at first you get this i won the election nine came everybody has to do what i want, and then house could even happen and as things take place it becomes clear to the president you don't get to do whatever you want and not only do they have a house and we can't get anything done at the house doesn't vote yes but they have enough votes to filibuster in the senate and you are going to need because of your spending problems obama is going to need many increases in the debt ceiling and the last time they asked for an increase in the debt ceiling is two and a half trillion the republicans announced the toll for that would be the rule which is 2.5 trillion in spending restraint over a decade so that
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funds the cost curve down going into the future so that's where we are. fiscal quote on january 1st if nothing is done if the republicans and democrats can't agree to something, taxes go up 500 billion. all of the 20012003 tax cuts laughs and that's 500 the ligon and one-year, 5 trillion over a decade on top of that the obamacare tax rates at 3.8% and obamacare taxes on savings and capital gains dividends which takes a lot of those taxes upon your all small businesses will pay the subchapter s will pay not today's 35% but about 44% of taxes. it's a 20% increase in the tax rate that higher income people, people that make more than two to $50,000 a year would pay but
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also half of all small business income. a million subchapter s corporations can't 3 million corporations like general motors that pay corporate rates 35% say you'll see the tax on small businesses jump as the president wishes more than just 539.6 but up another 328 points on top of that so what's going to happen? people talk about the fiscal cliff and the aggregate several things. that is collapsing tax cut. that is one piece of it. the second piece is the sequestration is $100 billion a year being sequestered and cut from the increases come of planned increases in the budget these are not cuts the way that you and i think of cuts. their budget increasing not as rapidly as the various agencies would like them to.
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50 billion of that is out of national defence or out of the pentagon and 50 million of that comes out of domestic discretionary and then there is a third subject and that is should there be a grand bargain to trade higher taxes for entitlement reform. then you put a fourth one out there which is we hit the debt ceiling at some point and we will continue. how will the republicans keep obama on a short leash and give an allowance every month in return for better behavior the way that you do with your kids or are they going to let him give him a debt ceiling that goes a long time? what is going to happen? two years ago we faced exactly the situation on the lapsing tax cuts, the 2001, 2003 tax cuts.
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at that time we had a republican house coming incoming democratic sent to the cassette coming in and a democratic president and the extended all the bush tax cuts. he says i'm going to hold my breath until i turn blue because i insist on this. two years ago he said he didn't want to raise taxes on small businesses and americans turning to a good $50,000 more a year because it would damage the economy. now evidently he thinks this economy is stronger than was two years ago to take that economic hit. it's an interesting question as to how that goes if you go for that tax cliff and taxes are raised dramatically the house will have already passed the law and he will say i'm not signing
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it and the president thinks he can explain to the country that the republicans did this. on the sequestered i thought that if republicans won the house and the presidency the sequestration wouldn't happen because the republicans would pass the bill which saves the same amount of money so it didn't give up any of the savings from the sequester but in fact did so by impacting the pentagon less heavily than the sequester and with the divided government i think you get the sequester. they say they want to change the money for the pentagon. mitch mcconnell said we are not raising taxes to ransom the pentagon budget cuts and interestingly, the focus on the pentagon they are a lot more concerned about the 50 billion in domestic discretionary spending restraints every year than the defense budget and you did see the republican study
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committee the conservative caucus within the republican house which is a majority of house members may be 60% announced the only thing worse than sequestration is not having savings so this stampede that was attempted as to people trying to start the hamdi beak a stampede you didn't get a demand that the defense budget would be untouched either on the public opinion or in the house something the sequestration happens. the only thing i can imagine is that they would vote rather take it out of entitlement than out of the annual budgets. could they cut a deal with a save the same amount of money but out of entitlements? that is the only compromise that i could see and then you get the grand bargain idea which is fascinating because of a, have
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these conversations where people last about the grand bargain what is the non-negotiable for obama to go up? he also wants to spend an additional $500 billion on the stimulus package and he's not willing to discuss entitlements and the republicans would like entitlement reform and not have the rates change and the fantasy is that the republicans would cave on the marginal tax rates and the president would cave on significant spending reform something that he's been president for four years and recommended nothing of. he had the house and the senate supermajority in the reform and then it if he had done any reform he would have completely undercut the moderate republican party's critique of the presidency.
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do they really want to reform entitlements except they've never done that with the power to do the opposite of that when they have the power to at. he calms his wife's beautiful. she sells it to buy a chain for his watch. they loved each other. indeed sacrificed to give to the other one they're trying to be nice to each other. i don't think we have the structure and incentives year. it's an all the production of so we go closer and closer to two things recommending most
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recently all of the negotiations be on c-span and we don't have closed rooms except for in the room that should be written and argued and discussed with the c-span cameras we promise not to be smirky about the fact that he promised to run for president to govern that way and we will take it now as a step in the right direction. and would be interesting to see who is willing to say yes without the cameras in their room and who doesn't want to. we have learned an awful lot about how the president believes behind closed doors from the book and i don't think it reflected well on the white house. they're both very doable and the second one is that whatever is
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agreed to it needs to be put in writing on line for seven days so that not just of the lobbyists in washington, d.c. can know what's in it that every american can know what is on it and do a word search and have other people disaggregated and take a look at it before either the house or the senate vote. there is a new verb in washington and those are the republicans that felt that they were sold a bill of goods by the bush white house and the treasury department said do this, it's an emergency. by the emergencies require expenditures and money at reentered $50,000,000,000.6 months later. it's to be rushed out in front of the cameras to agree to something that hasn't been written down. this seven day waiting period is
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something he ran on. he wasn't going to sign bills that haven't been are not for a while. nancy pelosi made that commitment as well. but the idea that these things should be written down on line so that not just inside the beltway people can read them that everybody can. both of those are the best protections against something that is very light on spending restraint or zero on the criminal spending restraint, and the tax changes are not perhaps they're advertised to be. republicans have lived through or talked to people that lived through the 80 to deal. $3 in spending cuts for every 1 dollar of tax increases the democrats passed and spending actually went up, not down. the tax increases were real and we are still paying them in 1990 and democrats offered bush to dollars of imaginary spending cuts for every 1 dollar of tax increases. i always thought about was cool
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if you are training imaginary budget cuts went in-1? we cheated reagan we didn't give him three. you don't get too. i thought that was descanting the poor guy but anyway, he signed on to it and threw away a perfectly good presidency because of it an otherwise successful presidency because of that. so we have twice gone into the grand bargain higher taxes for promises of spending cuts to read in the american people get very grumpy at the people that raised their taxes and the spending restraint didn't happen. is what's going to happen? we don't know. i think we get a better deal if it is televised. we get a better agreement if it's available to the american people to see for seven days in a row and both parties have
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claims to a mandate. i prefer the cards the republicans hold because they hold them for ten years democrat told the senate for two years and the presidency for four and they're sitting there in the house more like ten years looking at the states which have senate races up i think the argument that obama will have to eventually extend the tax cuts as is come from those under up many of them are quite red states and their opinions are strong candidates because they will survive in 2008 and got elected in 2008 against the obama landslide that year so whereas obama agreed to continue the tax cuts because he feared his own reelection this time it is the democrats in the senate that are in a similar position at obama was. >> there are two narratives and it seems the most are legitimate in their own way but there is also the question is clear that
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some republicans, some moderate republicans, some neoconservative people who were advisers to mitt romney reducing that president obama good to mandate and suggested that the republicans make major concessions. to what extent in your organization with the republicans to what extent is this feeling a kind of common among the rank-and-file members? >> the republicans are not tall spooked or distraught to read a lot of people are looking ahead a year ago or six months ago they elect the president in the senate and the sense of unhappiness was from the stock market didn't go up, not you lost your life savings. you end up with a status quo and
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we thought we were on a trendy and going to get the presidency and the senate so that was disappointing and you had people that were unhappy but it's a little hard to argue that in the republican party running on a fundamental reform of entitlements which all of the establishment people in washington say that they are for except when they pass the budget that does it degano where is the one of the tax increase. they are not interested in the reform of the entitlements they're interested in the tax increase, so they are holding. i talked to all the guys there and they are moving forward. remember every time the republicans have a bad election cycle, 64, 74, 76, 82, 86, 98, 2006, 2008 all sorts of helpful people come out and explain that the party should turn left and
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when the republican party hasn't taken that cheerful lot fais be weare. they've done better. so there is no sense of being spooked. people know that there are always advocates, columnists and others saying you should become democrats now. there would be a good idea. there's not a sense of panic. where i do think we have an intelligent rethinking going on and it's not even a shift so much as a change because the people there want to do it wanted to do three months ago and three years ago was on immigration reform and they're the republican party should look at the fact that it should be doing much better and is doing better with the hispanic vote but when they allow the voices
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into thinking that immigrant bashing is sound policy or sound politics, i think they are dangerous and the good news is there are a series of meetings that are going on and i've spent this weekend at the national coalition of the state legislators in new mexico talking about these topics. the business community wants immigration reform. the communities of faith, the roman catholic church was unhappy with how obama was treated them today and the evangelicals and care as mattocks. the mormon church is the most. they passed the counter to the arizona bill. they passed a law that says here is your permit you can stay around. so all of the various building blocks for the free market people and those that understand labor and capital and the needs of production should be more or
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less mobile. understand this coming and we ended up with a few loud voices from the monochromatic districts that represented nobody but themselves yet there was this sense bullfrogs in that pound that it's so loud. when you dream did there are three. so there's a very serious discussion going on about immigration and there should be. i've been printed press conferences for 20 years on that we just never had any attention on the press conferences. now i think there is more attention and more focus and that that will happen and you've seen a number of voices in the head of a southern baptist convention whose long been good on this, a louder voice and more listened to and those sort of things. on that i think you are going to see movement so it's not that the party isn't rethinking what
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it's doing it's just not going on the tax hike spend everything party. there's a place for people like that but we are the party that wants to talk to every immigrant not just hispanic immigrants from all the countries of the world and say we want to deal with you with respect and appreciation and the country would be better off with more of you here, not fewer. >> now to move to the general conversation we have about 45 minutes. because c-span is here, my request is so that people not just in the room but watching c-span would be able to understand. >> i am jonathan at the national journal. so, here's a question you asked.
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if the house member votes for a compromise that includes either a tax rate increase or a tax increase that isn't revenue natural what should that member expect to happen in his primary race following? >> good question. the taxpayer protection pledge is a pledge that i designed and share with all candidates in this says i promise the people of my state and the american people will vote against any increase either raising rates or broadening the base is a comedown. tax simplification, absolutely. reduced taxes, but no net tax increase and most republicans in the house and the senate have made that commitment a handful of democrats about 1300 state legislators. a lot of people have chosen to make that commitment to their
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constituents and every once in awhile people will say can you tell somebody it's okay for them to break their word for their constituent? no. i'm not in this equation. these are commitments they made to their own voters when they got elected that they wouldn't support the tax increases. they said i'm not raising taxes and going to reform the government so it costs less and when there's a problem i'm going to reform the government. i'm not going to say there's a problem everybody send more money to pay for the problem and continue to do everything we've been doing the last 50 or 70 years on something. when george herbert walker bush campaigned with a promise not to raise taxes and then turned around and raise taxes in return for promises spending cuts hasn't happened. the american people and elected him. i don't think we had to send out press to inform people that he had raised their taxes so this is something that when
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constituents to this both the democrats will run against them as tax increases as you saw in utah attacking her because she raised taxes as a city council person. republicans to raise taxes do their own brand a great deal of damage particularly if they put in writing to their constituents that that's not who they are and that is not what they do. >> you eluted to this and mentioned there was roughly 60% of the house republican caucus presented to say the only thing worse is the sequestration would be no cuts at all and you eluted to creating a groundswell to protect the pentagon from the cuts. i wonder if you would go into more detail on that and also related, how problematic is it that self-described conservatives like bill
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mcchrystal called for tax increases to protect the pentagon and even conservatives like bill kristol so for the tax increases to protect the pentagon and someone like me at the cato institute declaring myself a little and being supportive of the entitlement reform and then having people say they endorse the intelligence reform how would you respond to that? >> taking it backwards, bill has been on record saying that if the conservatives didn't want to be the party that he would join up with the liberal hawks, democrat liberal hawks. i'm not quite sure where he gets the plural in the democrat liberal hawks. i get to one and then i can't think of more but it was an odd sort of threat that it was kind of an explanation that he doesn't see himself as a mainstream republican that
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everything is hawkish in the foreign policy, not the reagan foreign policy but the hawkish foreign policy. so that isn't surprising. that is what he does but it's not at all transferable. there isn't a caucus in the house or the senate that falls in that category. some people are appropriators who are always in danger of going over to the dark side. the joke there are three parties in washington republicans, democrats and appropriators. that's been improved a little bit with the ban on some of the targeted handouts. we are not they're completely. i've talked to some guys that privately would wish they could make some of the defense go away. but the romney people ill served the country and themselves when they ran these campaigns and the defense to budget was cut all
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these jobs would disappear. we spent four years making fun of obama's multiplier that if the federal government spends this number of dollars you create jobs. that's like arguing that people who are involved in donations are creating additional kidneys. no they are not. they are just moving them around. the government creates jobs. no it doesn't. you can move stuffer down by you to get from somewhere and then you put it somewhere else and then you hold a press conference over year. the idea that you can stand on one side of the lake with reed and pelosi and obama with three pockets and take the three buckets of water and water and to the other side of the lake and in front of the cameras announce as you pour the money in you are filling the lake and its great depths. but we are going to do this and
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the spring to make a very deep. that is the keynesian economics. there are people that believe this stuff. luckily i refuse to learn this because it's nonsense. you take a dollar from somebody other wise shoplifters and bank robbers would be considered very helpful because they are always moving money from one place to another and evidently you get twice as much money if you steal the first dollar but if it turns into to there are people with a ph.d. that talk like this but they are democrats so for the republicans to talk about how the defense spending creates jobs was unfortunate. you can make an argument you need this plan for this tank or they are being annoying again, keep an eye on them i am fine with that we should have a national defense but don't so with as a jobs program. it's intellectually dishonest
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and there is a shame that it was done. >> what are her three revenue-raising provisions that can build [inaudible] >> the top marginal tax rate on the incomes and 25 to 35 he would have tremendous supplies in terms of the economic growth and the average is 25, we are at 45. the canadians are at 17. they are not hemorrhaging cash they are doing better so the low marginal tax rates count. obama is taking the tax up to 55% after million dollars. you don't have to be rich to fund your house increasing in value and working for 50 years deciding you have a lot of money
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that you signed up in the 401k so the supply-side tax reduction certainly can. selling assets. why in the world you talk about the defense department sitting on a whole bunch of spectrum that it ought to make available and sell it so there's a lot assets and there's land you could sell, there's a whole bunch of oil under the ground to get out of the way drilling on federal land rather than making it difficult but dueling for oil and natural gas has declined. he says will get all of this new drilling and natural gas. yes on private land where you can't stop a yet. it has gone up. but taking a pro-growth and pro, would be helpful. yes? >> [inaudible] >> it was the last time around, yes. i'm sure they were talking about those the last time around.
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>> if there is an increase which is a that is in violation of the pledge and are you worried about the words you are hearing from the speaker? is he talking about a tax increase or our people just hearing it from? stat he's in favor of the revenues that come from growth. i'm in favor of the revenues to come from economic growth. one of the numbers that doesn't get tossed around is the ceo says if you grow at 4% a year -- the congressional budget office they do static modeling. they do a whole bunch of things that i think understate how important to growth is 4% instead of 2%, four obama's
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polipoint you do that for the decade to present additional, the federal government nets $5 trillion more than i would have because more people are working. if at this point from the bottom of the recession if obama's growth was as strong as ronald reagan there would be 10 million more americans at work and gdp would be 10% higher. that is the cost of the regulatory attack and the spending and the debt stuff that obama did. 10 million americans out of work because obama went his direction rather than ronald reagan's direction, 10% smaller gdp. those that want our money from the pentagon should focus on economic growth. not to take a larger piece of the shrinking pie so i think growth is the only way to get out. 4% instead of obama for a decade
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in the right that he's a run-up in debt. i think there's important focuses on growth. when we see something in writing -- i'm not going to get involved in hypothetical sort, then it gets turned into more than i perhaps said or intended to say. when something is written down and the good news is you have it written down and put it online for seven days and the press and the american people look at. let's take a look at that. it's going to be either a clear tax increase or not. in 2010 the budget deal another tax increase so lots of deals nobody calls me on the fun
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wondering whether it's a tax increase or not. usually people asked when they have a new theory about how to raise taxes and they think if they move fast enough in front of me the would be okay, wasn't it? platts said it down and look at it. >> [inaudible] a net tax increase. >> obama wants higher marginal tax rates to punish people who work on saturday but i don't think he's going to get that. getting more revenue from growth so it can pay them so his debt and pay some of the bills he has run up the 20 necessary. it's not obama's $5 trillion. we are going to have to pay it. i would rather do that through growth and the slow economic growth
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>> i would like to talk about this dual mandate that you referred to, and what are the three propositions what they come together and the first coming and i've written this many times, the presidential elections are largely referendums on the incumbent of the incumbent party and in that vein of that is the case as i believe it is it even says that obama's performance as is judged by the electorate is not tremendous blast to making them ineligible for rehire. sickened when the country is in a deadlock of the kind that we are in now and it's happened in our history but it doesn't have an often, it generally means that the deadlock of the definition of america and the definition of the question facing the country to go towards
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a european style social democracy or more towards the traditional conservative populism of jackson or his ronald reagan, and third. when they manage to deal with the deadlocks to change the direction or brick at such a deadlock as this it comes into the presidential leadership. it doesn't come into any other means. that need to be a good harbinger for your policy and how they are bred to move forward on terms of what to promote. so, given all of that if you buy into any of it, it is to what extent do you see any way in the world that the next four years are going to be anything other than a continuation of the last four struggling through, kicking the can down the road not
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dealing with the fundamental problems of america? >> three very good questions. i would say that obama's first term has two parts before and after the 2010 election just as the clinton administration was also two parts. as a talk about the last years and clinton when the republicans took the house and forced them to keep welfare reform and cut the capitol gains tax. they never talk about the first two years where the jobs reflect when the democrats ran everything. i'm in favor of the last six years of the clinton administration, lower tax rates on capital gains, republicans wanted more. the beginning of spending restraints and none of his spending policies. there are four years and two years sets and what is the third act, okay?
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my guess is the third act looks a lot like 2011, 2012. we talked about the dual mandate to 86% for personal attacks on mitt romney. romney gives people cancer. that kind of stuff, not morning in america, didn't do a good job, not here is my plan for the future, here's my entitlement reform, here's my plan here. they voted for and wrote for a budget score twice with virtually every republican in the house and the senate so, they made it clear where they were going. obama ran against romney to raise taxes so the president won the mandate not to beat romney the next four years because he gives people cancer and is a bad
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person and is mean to dogs. he didn't make the case for what he wants to do. he didn't spend time on that in either defending his record or making the case for the next four years would look like other than he would be a bad person. the deadlock or gridlock is better than going in the wrong direction. it's been a big improvement in the wrong direction for the last two years in the administration. you talk about the presidential leadership. we are going to have a certain amount of gridlock on a bunch of issues because you can make a list of things obama wants and the house republicans want obama isn't for them but at the state level do think taxing high income people doesn't affect economic growth well, let's see we are having a little experiment on that it's called california. it's called illinois, it's called maryland, and i don't see any reason why we don't wait two years and see whether how
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california is doing with their new higher marginal tax rates on folks and the taxes on middle-income people as well and maryland is raising the tax on the eyes that made 1 million to under 50i think now down because they can't leave because the federal workers make a million dollars to walk across the border so people are testing obama's theories in the state's and i think we should do it on a small state like vermont and see how it works but they wanted to go to california where as texas and florida are giving an idea of how you can govern without an income tax. we kind of know what is going to happen here. indiana, illinois. border. indiana passed right to work.
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they're giving school choice vouchers scholarship. illinois just raise taxes so as not to reform the government worker pension system. who is going to build the factory in the 100 miles on the western side of the border? any takers for the people that think jobs and opportunities are going to move into the illinois? what if we knew something isn't going to work to be imposed nationally when we watch it fail with the state level? people believing blue states not all heading to the warmer claims but with no income tax and less spending, less government services. people move to the states with fewer government services. then why do we pretend that people want as opposed to what
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the unionized bureaucracies in the state government says it wants. and we also see the tests on school choice. louisiana and indiana 100,000 arizona. democrats have been claiming if you let people have school choice something awful will happen.
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romney was the governor of massachusetts. i'm from massachusetts prior to immigrating to the united states i lived there. it's not like the rest of the country. republicans governor was 80% democrat. you're sitting there. he's a goalie and he stopped a lot of the shots and did amazing things on defense. you couldn't say he governed the state. it's not reasonable because of the way it was structured. so it was a difficult case to make in romney didn't do it. >> jacob. >> -- national interests. >> grover, the one thing you haven't talked about today's controlling or shrinking the size of government. he just talked about taxes.
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but the object to those upholding the line or lowering taxes is ultimately supposed to be to contain or reduce the size of government. do you feel closer or further from that goal today? >> much closer and for two reasons. one of the tea party and the other is divine budget, the ryan plan your up until the tea party, i would've been hearing told you obama is going to spend too much money, but she can't get the american people upset about spend too much. you have to until spend to much becomes a text increase. that's what the pledge was the best defense against their government. but obama showed that with the same misreading of his mandate that he is doing now. so when someone suggests a bonus misreading his mandate, he did it for years ago. he threw a 70% approval rating within a few the stimulus
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package, written and are come on this other stuff, massive debt and spending. you had a million people going into the streets on april 15. the guy had only two shona and started spinning crazily. he then hand a reaction from the tea party movement for which reacted in 2010. people lost elections overspend too much. the first guy to get whacked with specter, arlen specter of pennsylvania. i was working to get him reelect it. he was going to be good on labor union demand for not wanting to have elections to take power. he was going to be good on judges. he was fine on taxes. he was going to send off a right of center primary enviable to governing get reelected and then obama came and said if you vote for stimulus i'll stay out of
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philadelphia and we can probably do some things to be hopeful to pennsylvania with your name on it. and he goes, i just want reelection. under to win a primary assignment to stimulus. obama will stay at doing the vote against me and people will be happy. within two months he was unelectable on the spending issue. not tax issue, spending. so the page and the python from the freshman class that came in 2010 largely got reelected with more like them with spending and shouting and ringing in their ears. they are going to be focused on spending in the way that i selected 20 and 40 years ago. reagan taxes got it. regulations, got it. spending in general. as the boat moving issue, it was. that was what was very shocking. mine comes in and said he thought it was a talk in the
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spending. i consider the right thing to be all about sending. the entitlement reform which brings spending to 16% of gdp seems about it a bonus plan at the same time takes 38. how to set several up from me versus obama plan. you could asterix tell you they can't calculate that level of debt and what it would do to the country. unchanged direction. so the ryan plan is always about reforming entitlement suspending its a smaller% of gdp rather than a lurcher 8% of gdp tickets to stronger economic growth. modern republican party, which is now field-tested and our veterans defending entitlement reform and talking about it and having people beat them on it and trip him up a trick questions on the subject is infinitely stronger than the republican party four years ago, six years ago and spending
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issue. every crisis bush had he spent more money on. every crisis bush faced he spent more money on. he never saw a crisis and said lets them less. every crisis is bigger government. >> i'm sorry, but i do not see this election is a ringing endorsement of the tea party or the ryan plan. can you tell me, why did obama win if he promised to raise taxes? why did he win? >> two things. one come he dropped 8 million votes for the margin he got was shrinking. he was the incumbent. he ran a better campaign with a candidate to emirate of flaws with the fact he introduced obama carried massachusetts and pushed it. a little hard to beat a candidate against obamacare when you have that happening. because of his massachusetts where he was governor, he didn't have the record that mitch did milosevic or bobby jindal or rick scott -- rick perry from any of these guys who said here's a nice date. we were doing interesting, cool
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things, tort reform. romney had none of that in his background. actually come in the ad that they ran against romney where he was going to raise taxes in the discussion obama did say something the press didn't focus on, although we sent it out as a press release and that was in 2008. romney said i will never raise your taxes if you are in less than $250,000 a year. not sure income taxes, not sales tax, not excise tax. that was a commitment 2008. 2010 august 8 in grand junction, colorado company started to say repeated verbatim again and again and again, my plan is if you earn less than two and $50,000, i will not raise income taxes next year. two changes as promised and what didn't get talked about nbc, cnn or any of the networks.
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what he just announced as he can do a energy tax tomorrow and not have broken his word and energy tax of course whacking the middle class. he can raise income taxes on people a year from now, which is why what he wanted to do was kick out the bush rates for people less than 250 per year. he can't get -- and this is where you talk about dual mandates. were talking about marginal tax rates on higher income people and successful small businesses. that raises 400 alien. this other taxes in addition to rate increases he wants to include. he talks about the rates. over a decade. so he is $800 billion he plans to raise from higher income people. the size of the dead if he gets that in his budget, assuming he gets the tax hike, he raises a trillion dollars in debt over the next decade.
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so having solved less than 10% of the problem company then comes back and says that he was going to pay the 8 trillion? .the energy tax, which pours the treasury department has seven times people have been trying to subpoena the information. they don't want to share with anyone because it's not really relevant. carbon as in carbon copies. they are planning on an energy tax to turn into a vast. you cannot turn the united states into european social welfare system with the income tax. it can't be done. rates have to be to hide. people won't pay it and you have all the problems that carter had with the same challenges. double taxing, savings and investment and business income just gets to be too heavy a burden.
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every major country introduced and fell. but that stayed in. so we are now looking at the entry point for the fact it's an energy tax on the obama people say well if the republicans were to recommend it, we'd be all over it. a guy who promised he wouldn't raise taxes on middle incomes as if somebody else touches the murder weapon first, he'd be right there. he just wants republican fingerprints on the process. so either we win or lose the fight about the tax increase. that's not the target. that's not a fun. he didn't attack from on the middle class and that's what the second term is all about. the sooner we get past the pretend on a handful of people with about 88 trillion additional debt running up over that decade.
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and you know who the target is for that. [inaudible] 60% of the voting public was in favor of increasing marginal tax rates at least on the top 2%. the other question is an earlier exchange the phrases used, if republicans are talking about tax increases, action republicans are talking about tax increases. all the tax increases or revenue increases as part of the deal. snl or as members of congress looking for ways to take over things other than marginal tax rates. elementary specific members who talk about it up corker, tom coburn and john mccain.
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so what's going on here? they scrambled here to find a way to raise revenues in the cbo score in a way that can then be explained to constituents is not violating the pledge. so the question is, what's lucena smasher? [inaudible] >> i take a very strong exception to take in this all seriously. if u.s. people come in the vast majority of whom are not going to be subject to the stocks and there've been told that somebody else would have to pay. in the process of only 60% in favor of that, i think it speaks for itself and speaks very well of the american people. if you have a public opinion vote with the cbs, how would you
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feel if we cut all your taxes by half in those who get the institution except we have both are obama comes in the united states. also in my view should not be a part of the series communication everything elsey said i completely agree with. >> from february standard, that means i won. [laughter] >> the exit hole that was done at several questions in if you cut and paste some of them come you get the 60% number. they actually asked a question, which is interesting that people depressor, but the 60% number with an actual question which is should you raise the tax system which is the question on the table, 63% said no. you can also look at the history of questions when they had the
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same questions raised on the discussion of the debt ceiling increase. if we raise taxes on the rich, deeply that will end up taxing the middle class? yes, 75%. if we raise taxes, and you think they'll just spend the money? 63% say yes. so you could get some sort of visceral uniforms what color would you like answers from voters, but if u.s. a second question to raise taxes committee to else than that? yes, they do. you think are really coming after you? yes, they do. the argument and people ask how how come people are against tax on someone else. california had an initiative last year to raise tax on cigarette. only 8% of the people in california smoke cigarettes. the only state the smoke cigarettes less is utah and they have a rule against it. so in california, that got voted
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down, even though it was a tax on the other, which i thought was fairly interesting. on the pledge he gave me three people, corker, mccain and coburn. the republican modern party, none of those are considered leaders on economic issues are corker got reelected promising people mistake you'd never do this. i spent a lot of time with coburn when he was walking into the gain of six negotiations. i talked to them on the phone and have them a letter and said here's two and 90 and walking down an alley with some unsavory people. this will not end well. he said look, first of all he go back with the other two republicans for not doing anything as a tax increase. only revenue increases in gross. that's what we're doing. it was a letter to me, but it was an open letter. editing make it public, he did. remain it clear that he only
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revenue he would be for. in conversation he kept saying, you know, i don't think they will let us have spending restraint unless he gets a tax increase. while he was wrong and everyone else is right because in the budget controller to get 2.5 trillion a tax increase. he actually had to walk out of the negotiations because when he sat there with urban, he said i'm not really for a tax increase. i'm just putting tax increase on the table here in durban is even beyond the spending cut and i haven't agree to anything. i just talk about tax increase. said senator committee think it's possible german suspect the democratic caucus and says that these imaginary and cuts on the table and seven at tom coburn says he never be that dishonest. i think he is any think you're
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not and i think he seriously and you should not take him seriously. they spent more than a year putting the simpson/bowles commission, which if you've seen it is a fight temptation. it's an outline, a haiku. the only numbers are in the page numbers. it is a series of interesting things. there's specific about tax burden from 18.5% of full employment to 21 q. that is effectual in dollars tax increase. it's 2.5% of gdp. sci-fi dollars in tax increases. plus as ryan reid it's a trillion dollars in tax increases from eliminating or reducing reductions in exemptions and someone. balmy seaside in addition. i don't read that in the affidavit as simpson holes, but
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ryan was in discussions and i wasn't. if you were $5 tax increase with a million specified in the rest not worth the $6 trillion deficit with the goal setup was the one. the rather significant tax increases and interests have been agreed to by none of the democrat. we do know beside nice things about symbols. there are some spending restraint. on a single idea was put in a bonus budget, not one. so we know he's not for any of that. when republicans put them in subsequent savings from the budget control act, democrats all objected. are officially against every savings discussed. so when they spent nine months, if i truly dollars tax increase and tax reform and spending reform and when we finally went
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in the room to see what they came up with, they didn't have legislative language. we should have taken two weeks. if eddie pio of typewritten pages that say all play and no work. but they didn't have anything. in nine months. why? because it's not real. people say this imaginary agreement that isn't written down his massive tax increase on level on spending. simpson/bowles is a distraction from the fact that the two parties fundamentally disagree on the direction of the country and this is where we have people who tell you why don't we have the good old days of bipartisan compromise telling you how old they are because they are old enough to remember 30 years ago when parties didn't mean anything in terms of being right or left. >> has the pledge lost its magic? in a dignified way when i look
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and see what looks like a version -- [inaudible] >> you are mistaken, about through 2010, 2011 for headlines explaining the republicans are about to raise taxes in the pledge about to fall apart. this is the 27th time the assertion has been made in the last couple of years. if you look at the entire republican leadership has been elected on that commitment in the house and senate. and the people who sometimes have conversations. you left out lindsey graham to us have talked to mr. grover. if democrats give a significant 10 to one entitlement reform, even i promised people of south dakota and south carolina but it wouldn't, i would go for a tax increase to get this fundamental entitlement reform. i said to have you ever met a democrat willing to do that quite said senator, you offer a
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tax increase in return for a golden unicorn that doesn't exist and i don't stay up late at night because he said anything that isn't entitlement reform innocent victim in the cake is a phony. he's dismissive of people who after promises of tax cuts. he's going to have a much tougher deal. so i don't think -- no, commitment by the modern republican party house and senate, governors is to reduce spending, not to raise taxes although one can get a congressman or senator to talk about a hypothetical and get in trouble. i usually call them and say did you mean to endorse that? no. i've had discussions with corker and so on as well. i don't think they'll offer anything on spending that will even tempt someone to break their commitment to their
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constituents. [inaudible] >> rover, reminded hon -- [inaudible] as you know we have huge problems. since july the team -- [inaudible] [inaudible] i think we have to publish online bills. i think transparency is great, but we have a real situation but a musty fix the fiscal cliff it can be potentially catastrophic, especially when added to it's happening in europe. so what can be done positively, given the deadlock, given wasting about taxes and other people and spending.
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would you agree we have a huge problem? >> yes, we have a huge problem. federal governments from 5 trillion in debt. the economy is weak. this is the lousiest recovery would ever have. they keep talking about fiscal recoveries being defined. you go back into the century and they all recouped a lot faster than this one. obama and hoover both reacted the same way to a recession coach was more spending, higher taxes and not the regulations in obama and fdr never did anything hoover hadn't done already except the ftc are doing the same. i think there's very serious damage done to the economy and world economy by the approaches are stuck running to this and that obama has put on steroids. there were many problems with
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bush allowing the clinton changes with fannie mae and freddie mac to continue, to not be ended. i was a very big problem. hostility to the tea party i understand because the team party came in and changed the direction of the modern republican party to make it much more serious about spending and it wasn't that way before. [inaudible] [inaudible] >> house republicans to pass a that would work. they pass the extension of tax cuts that would work. you go and how conversations in front of the american people without ads about how romney is mean to dogs and causes cancer and actually talking about issues. i think that is the debate we need to have. we have a habit. certainly didn't have it in the last election. we can have it now and i think it's very helpful. at the end of the day will make the right decision partially because democrats are terrified
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of the damage -- the cliff you threaten to drive them over and they will not actually do that as obama threatened to toss off a cliff a year ago august and didn't. >> that's all for boeing. [inaudible] >> so i thought i nail down where i thought you were, that we were going to get the negotiation required to stay alive in the fiscal cliff. but there's two pieces. there's a tax hike and the sequestered. i consider them very different projects. obama is trying to put them together the same way the guy who wrote three card monte wants you to. >> what i hear is one or all of them will be sailing off january 1st and at that point doctors quit except in medicare
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because they get 30% less. i believe the number is payroll taxes go up, which makes all the people up in 80% have never heard of sequester. i'm having a very difficult time visualizing what february looks like when the press gets a hold of this and all of a sudden we also have the debt limit. i just can't see what were going to do. >> the debt limit is an additional tool to explain to obama that he is not the king and that henry viii has to go to parliament for money. you might want to nationalize the monasteries, but i don't think he can get as much these days as he could but then. he's got to go to parliament, got to go to congress for resources, for a debt ceiling, for all of these things. it will dawn on him that is not
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the king. he's not the duke. he's one of the guys in a constitutional government that has very limited powers. he should get on the phone with other people. asked clinton what he got accomplished in the second term that didn't include any republican legislation. it's going to be difficult, but at the end of the day obama will not be selfish and will keep the country's interests at heart. i think he is to recognize damage is done and needs, taxes, regulations. were about to hit all the ugly bits of obamacare. i passed up on a chair. 3000 pages or there's a reason they didn't pass in 12 pieces. if i was running a billet that was popular as republicans did flaming arrows of tax cuts. let's cut the debt tax, let's cut the capital gains tax. one every week he wanted people to watch it. that's not how they did
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obamacare. they bobadilla because they thought they were 12 wonderful pieces in a? now come in the past two things of and made them happen immediately. this is preexisting conditions and 26 euros can stay at home on mom and dad insurance. it's taking away your health care as you understood it prior to everything you were told they were. it's a very unpleasant side of surprises for the american people about obamacare all the way into the future. this tax increase, seaquist ration is not the only bumpy part of the road and the massive problems of regulation phone banks. there's a lot of damage it to be done. a full shutdown tracking and that is why i would argue when we look at this fight, 30 red states doing better than 14 states and the voices out there. there's a lot of different
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approaches people are taking, including how digital obamacare. >> thank you offer what i think is a terrific conversation. i think that's your position is quite clear and well understood and it's going to be reasonable. thank you very much. [laughter] >> let's have it on c-span so everybody can see what goes on. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]
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[inaudible conversations]
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>> how does one adequately expresses feelings about a special friend? when that friend is also a national hero of unimaginable proportion and a legend whose name will live in has jury long after all here today have bee forgotten.mked down >> statelet down kindly on us when she chose neil to be the first adventure to the world and have the opportunity to look at from space at the beauty of ourr own. it could've been another,anothe it wasn't, and it wasn't for a
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reason. no one, no one, but no one could have accepted the responsibility of his remarkable accomplishment with more dignity and more grace he embodied all that is good ans all that is great about america. >> president obama is campaign manager, ted koppel spoke at a breakfast this morning. see also his remarks at 6:00 p.m. eastern on a competing network, c-span.
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here's a brief look at some of his comments. >> it's just a random sample. they do not wait to party. they don't deal with cell phones. because of the law to hand a cell phone, you can't autodial cell phones. so if you're not going to tell funds into your sample, you're going to understand minorities. so that's going to make yours ample older than they should be and not enough minorities as they should be. that's why some polls look so difficult for the president because they were under sampling our electorate. you have to understand what the electorate is going to look like a that's another place for a bunch of pollsters just got it wrong. >> the truth is the majority of public polls were closed. >> no, no, no come at the end of
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last folk got it right. we all come up and get to the last poll. for more descriptive of what were they doing before that point if you saw balances up and down with independent, that's people getting the sample wrong. >> you think the state of public polling the u.s. is evident is what? payment row can. >> what needs to be done to fix it quite >> would be an ongoing discussion about how to get more cell phones in with the electorate looks like. it's expensive. >> battleground, george washington. >> they give you a price and does he know from your prices pay more if you have cell phones in it because it's more as. can you do because you want what makes sense. >> but you think even more self runs. >> in this room if you're under
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30, raise your hand if you have a landline? raise your hand if you have a cell phone. come on. so for people who don't put cell phones, hang on. i'm not done ranting. we did an experiment until bennison of people who we know already early voted using the gallup electorate. 20% of people who had early voted for the gotten thrown out on the screen. they said they were going to vote. that's just a completely wrong screen. you guys, everyone also putting tolls on the front page of their papers in the leak of the new saint obama is now down 14 points and he was tight a week ago. no, no, he wasn't. the fact is he just screwed up your sample on the pole.
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>> former abc news reporter and "nightline" anchor, koppel talks about how news consumption and the internet except to the quality reporting. from a reporter in harvard university professor, now contributes to not center is and also a commentator on npr. this is about an hour 15 minutes. [applause] >> hello and welcome to the national press club into another edition of the caliber poor. i am marvin kolb and our subject tonight, the subject of news, conversation with ted gobble about democracy and the press. they use the word hardly but it's on its way out in something new is emerging, whether what is the will satisfy urgent needs of
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our democracy cannot be known at this time. let's hope that it will because about a free, inquisitive, occasionally rambunctious media will not be living in an open society. the free press and open society are intimately linked, one dependent on the other. if network news is that twilight, perhaps our democracy is facing a turning point as well. i've asked an old friend, ted koppel to understand what those changes might mean for society. ted is known best for his 25 years as anchor and host of "nightline," but has also been a foreign correspondent, war correspondent and his covert campaigns. in preparing iran into the
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following interesting. ted joined abc news in 1963. i joined cbs in 1957. if my arithmetic is right, together we represent more than 100 years of journalistic experience. i mean, that's enough to depress anybody. so ted, what in gods name hauber learned about our sacred craft of journalism in all these years? >> i think we've learned not to make addictions. >> so what are you predict in? >> i predict your title, provocative as it may be may be premature. i think when americans finally realize how bad our what terrible straits our political system is in, i think may be a
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resurgence of the kind of journalism you and i grew up with. >> of the marvelous, optimistic style. >> actually it's a terrible thought because it suggests a shift of the date is almost going to have to sink before people are going to jump back into the lifeboat. >> t. think we can truly define journalism? if somebody walked in the room right now from mars and set but are these guys talking about? journalism, explain to that guy. >> it is to take it back when you and i were young and when you and i began this business. for a moment, i will limit it to broadcast journalism. when you and i were young, there were three networks on national television they have to do it on abc, nbc or cbs.
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when i was in vietnam in the late 1960s, if i did a piece in the field, it would be three days before the piece got in the air. it meant you prepare your stories with one of the sons of context. you prepared your stories knowing they had to survive. two days, three days, sometimes even more than i. i have nothing but respect, admiration and a little bit of sympathy for her colleagues today who quite literally have to report almost around the clock. >> life. >> life. >> whether they work for television or radio or newspaper, they have defiled for the blog.
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there cannot have to do their little face that number. the only thing i never seen the schedules for which adequate time to them last his reporting. i sometimes wonder how they find the time to gather the material. but it but it but it. we have more media available today, more means of communicating information than have ever existed in the history of the world. we are so enchanted with our ability to be fast but i think we sometimes lost connection with what we are saying them why. >> i want to pursue that, but why did you even get into this business? >> i got into it for much the same ways you did. what i'm going to say is i don't
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think i would've been terribly good at anything else. when i was born and spent the first part change yours of my life in england, my father listened to the bbc during world war ii. i was just this little tyke in those days, but i still remember at least my memory may be playing tricks on me, but i still remember hearing reports being rebroadcast on the bbc and i swear that from earliest childhood on, all i ever wanted to do and t. was a journalist, preferably as close as they could make it, which probably isn't too far. >> not too far at all.
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i did a piece for "the new york times" magazine section on soviet youth in the spring of 1957, called me and said can you come down and talk to me about soviet youth. she was extremely curious about everything. first i talked from the secretary said as i went in, you've got 30 minutes. that's a common that. i said that's okay with me. three hours later she came in at that i think you've got other events today. but he used to get so absorbed in these things that i met him and was completely bowled over. this is a great journalist and his interest in the end those interested in. >> if you look back at the man, they think he hired many women.
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>> are a couple part of the world war ii that cbs, but they did not last. after the war they went on for different reasons. >> the point of whether it was a howard case, the people that admiral hired were people of substance, historians, writers, readers who cared about history. sometimes when i look at what passes for news on cable television especially the case, i wonder where they find these people. >> they cared a great deal about writing and one of the point you were making earlier about something you want it to us for three, four, five days before it would get on the air, it had to be written and written while. murdo cared a great deal about style and the way in which he
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presented information. >> i'm just going to interrupt you for a second. take a look how often when you watch something on cable television that requires great skill as in any fashion. but notice how often what you're hearing is just whatever comes out the top of the head of the man or woman who was reported. take note of how rare it is for a script to be written. now if you only have a couple of minutes to report something, there really is some skill required. the essence of journalism, after all, let's not simply in the reporting, but in the editing, in determining whether one thing it's important to a story and
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the other is not. putting it into some kind of context. occasionally even historical context. folks are pretty good at ad-libbing, but that takes more skill than most people have. >> absolutely. you have taken us from what was then you've raised to what is in journalism today. what has changed? take off the major changes. >> since you and i began? >> first of all the biggest change i argue came about in 1868. 1960 you have to understand was an extraordinary year. 1968 was the year in vietnam, dear that lyndon johnson stepped out and said he wouldn't run for president again. the year that martin luther king was assassinated. the year bobby kennedy was
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assassinated. the year of the rights of the democratic convention in chicago. so it's not too surprising we may not pay as much attention as they should to the birth of a new form of television news. television newsmagazine began in 1960, called the zeno 60 minutes. 60 minutes has done an extraordinary job over this last 44, 45 years. it also did something no television news program had ever done before. it made money. it turned a profit. >> declare about that. >> if it happened it was everything. >> it was for the most part in lots reader. television news did not make money. >> tell folks, was that frank
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stayton, it was bill bailey. bill bailey who came to you folks who are producers and journalists at cbs said. >> used to call us at chose in his crown. >> don't worry about making money. >> that's right. you guys don't worry about that. what that meant was when he went out to do a story, we were totally absorbed in the story. we weren't worried how much money would take to cover the story. we just did it, even as late as 1980 i remember being able to charter a plane from rome to istanbul because he thought you might be able to get an interview with somebody important for your peace. we didn't check with your cut off. but now, we have become profit centers that the networks.
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but the cable stations also. being a profit center is a huge responsibility because it means you start thinking in a different way. you start thinking about what the public ought to year, but rather what the public wants to hear. you are now in competition with the other networks, not just for audience, but your competition to make money. we make money as a good u.n. for instance. i may be doing my former colleagues at nbc and injustice, but i seem to recall the last one-hour documentary that played in prime time was on the subject of charlie sheen and his carousing, one amazing, all the
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other good things he was doing, which were clearly of enormous interest to all of you because that is why they put it on the air. they got a big audience. >> the difference between need to know it ought to know. spell that out a little bit. >> when what you worry about is making money, you try to focus on those names that were most likely to attract an audience in least likely to cost a great deal of money. so the first thing you do i remember many years ago getting a call from my old colleague teeter jennings. he said, had the bean counters been in touch with you? asset as a matter of fact he just got off the phone with them. and what the bean counters wanted to know from him and from the westside, how many times in a year does "nightline" use the moscow bureau?
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they asked peter jennings the same thing. i may attempt is world news tonight is the moscow bureau? they asked the same thing of the tinkerer producer of 2020 and "good morning america" and then they did a simple calculus. so the moscow bureau costs of the $2 billion a year and among all bbc programs it was used to say 50 times a year, 15 to 2 million, $40,000 a report? wow, close down the moscow bureau. and what happened with the moscow bureau at abc and what has happened for the most part at nbc, cbs, abc, most of the overseas bureaus now are essentially just mail drops, were you may have some local employee keep in the open and
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when something really big happens, when something really big happens in mexico city, beijing, hong kong coming you ship in one of the star correspondents or even an anchor. the difference between covering the news year after year after year in a country, maybe even learning the language, certainly getting to know the people, getting to know who the movers and shakers are in with the political dynamic in that country is, that really is not happening much anymore and parenthetically what's happening in our business is also happening in the intelligence field at the cia, were quite literally -- >> i don't want to go too far there. [laughter] i want to talk to you a little bit about the role of cable television, which you touched on before. in a recent interview with bill
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o'reilly of fox, he derided ideological coverage of the news bad for america, making it difficult if not impossible for congress to reach across the aisle and find compromise. you also wrote in an op-ed piece, this is not good for the republic. what do you mean? >> what i mean, and this goes back really a continuation of the same theme. first of all, in addition to demonstrating the network news divisions could make money, there was a technological explosion. it wasn't just the three networks anywhere. they would cable, satellite television, the internet. now they're quite literally hundred's, even thousands of competitors out there. what is incredibly cheap to put on the air is a couple of people like you and me just yelling at each other, talking.
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what draws an audience is when in fact we disagree, when in fact we get nasty with one another. what rupert murdoch and robert ailes demonstrated 15 years ago is there really was a hunger in america for something that was less liberal than what the networks are putting on the air. so fox news was on an fox news has been hugely successful, earn somewhere between one and $1.5 billion a year. now my current employers, the folks over at nbc have their own cable network, msnbc. wasn't doing very well. wasn't making any money. they took a look at what fox has done and they said if they can make a billion and a half dollars a year doing news that skews to the right, if we only make half of that, that's still $750 billion a year.
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but skewed to the left. and so you have one cable television news that caters to people who consider themselves progressives, news that caters to people who consider themselves to be conservatives. you have the afternoon radio talk shows, evening radio talk shows, which cater largely to the conservatives. you have the late-night comedy shows. jon stewart, stephen colbert are that indicate more to the left and the end result is that the area that has gone more or less follow a serious news organizations reporting the important events of the day without any kind of political bias. we have grown up as a nation now, believing that we are entitled to hear views that essentially resonate to the views we already hold.
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the end result of that becomes and we've seen it this year with a lot of distinguished senators, congresspeople leaving because they are olympia snowe left the senate because she simply can't handle the nastiness anymore. and there's an awful lot of that. you cannot in a democracy. >> you made the point -- >> what i just finished this one line. you cannot in a democracy expect people to reach across the aisle and make accommodations for important issues if they are terrified that in so doing they are going to ask those themselves to either the right or the left, either john stewart's humor or rush limbaugh's sharp tongue. >> so what you said not too long ago was that the commercial
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success of both fox and msnbc has become a source of nonpartisan sadness for you. >> you and i have no for many, many years that we operate in a business. but as we were saying a few minutes ago, that business used to make all of it money with i love lucy and jack benny and the sunset strip whatever else was hot in the 70s. me so much money that they could afford to spend 20, 30, 40, $50 million a year covering the world. that is no longer the case and that's dangerous. >> you know, my sense every now and then, ted is that though there are good journalists in
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cable television, the whole package of cable television when it is presented to the american people tends to debase just about anything it touches. that doesn't mean every conversation is bad, but it does mean that the package comes through as a negative, as something that makes fun of people, that is overly critical, that is not real. the macbook, for them to create a c. program and sunday mornings called gps. >> yes. >> first-rate television. he is a smart man. he invites smart people on this program and they talk about important issues in a smart way. i doubt that he is 200,000 people watching that show.
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it's probably a fairly big audience if he gets that many. it's on a sunday morning, which is when programs that still survive to one degree or another hour, but you're never going to see the program in prime time during the week. >> in your judgment, since cable television is the place where you are going to get right, left, political conversation and cnn living in the middle so awkwardly and trying desperately to keep his base, is it doing good things for democracy in your view? >> of course not. is he doing good things? >> oid of cable television. i mean, i feel quite often that if you eliminate msnbc, fox for which i do occasional commentary and cnn would pr

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